Qais Akbar Omar

Qais Akbar Omar (first name pronounced "Kice") is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers, which has been published in more than twenty languages, and the co-author of A Night in the Emperor’s Garden, which has been dramatized by BBC Radio. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Sunday Times, The Boston Globe, The Globe and Mail, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, and he has published essays and short stories in The Southern Review, AGNI, The Hopkins Review, The Markaz Review, Guernica, Arrowsmith, Literary Hub, American Chordata, and elsewhere.

Omar was born in 1982 in Kabul, Afghanistan. He holds a BA in journalism from Kabul University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and he was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University in 2014–15

Omar comes from a family of carpet traders, and he served as a textiles specialist for USAID and the Asian Development Bank, helping carpet weavers across Afghanistan.