An Egyptian novelist and translator born in the UK in 1984, Walaa Kamal brings a multifaceted background in mass communication, cinema, and a master’s degree in Arabic literature to his fiction. His narrative style is marked by a cosmopolitan awareness and deep psychological and historical probing. His acclaimed novel Al-Quddas Al-Akheer (The Last Mass) was shortlisted for the Sawiris Cultural Award (Young Writers category); it is a dark, poetic journey through Europe that reconstructs a fragmented past involving art, religion, and the grotesque. His ambitious historical epic, Kosh Ko, transports readers to early 20th-century Cairo through the eyes of a Nubian boy working at the Shepheard’s Hotel, brilliantly interrogating colonial hegemony and class dynamics in a rapidly shifting world.