Bushra Khalfan is an Omani novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. She was born in 1969 and worked for more than ten years as a columnist for Omani newspapers such as Al-Watan and Al-Ru’ya. Currently, she writes for the daily Oman and runs creative writing workshops in Oman and in other Arab Gulf countries. Her most recent novel Dilshad (2021), a vibrant and gritty twentieth-century epic, tells the story of three generations of minority communities within the ethnic, linguistic and cultural melting pot that is Oman’s capital Muscat. The book—already in its tenth edition at the time of writing—was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2022 and the same year won the Katara Prize. Khalfan’s debut novel, The Garden, was published in 2016, and she has also published three short story collections and two books of prose.