Amara Lakhous was born in Algeria in 1970 and lived in Italy for eighteen years before moving to the United States in 2014. A bilingual novelist in Arabic and Italian, he is the author of Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, a bestseller translated into ten languages and adapted into a film in 2010. He is currently a professor in the practice in the Department of Italian Studies at Yale University.