Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and writer who currently lives in Italy. Born in 1970 in Ajdabiya, a town south of Benghazi, she studied Education and was a lecturer at Libyan universities. She holds a PhD in Human Sciences from La Sapienza University, Rome; her dissertation focussed on the slave trade in Libya during the Ottoman period. She is the author of four novels, several collections of short stories, a play, and poetry. She was the first Libyan writer to be shortlisted for The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) with her novel The Slave Yards (2016). She spent the 2018 Banipal Writing Fellowship Residency at Durham University, where she completed her book An Ongoing Coincidence (2019). She has also co-lead a series of creative writing workshops for Arab writers in Sharjah when it was World Book Capital in 2019. Besides the English translation of one novel and one short story collection, several of her short stories have been included in anthologies published by Bloomsbury (Beirut 39 : New Writing from the Arab World, 2010), Saqi Books (Translating Libya: The Modern Libyan Short Story, 2008) and Comma Press (Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations, 2018), Catalyst Press (Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa, 2021).