Mohamed Metwalli

was born in Cairo in 1970. He has a BA in English Literature from Cairo University, 1992. The same year, he won the Yussef el-Khal prize awarded by Riadh el-Rayyes Books in Lebanon for his poetry collection, Once Upon a Time. He co-founded an independent literary magazine, el-Garad, in which his second volume of poems appeared, The Story The People Tell in the Harbor, 1998.

He was selected to represent Egypt in the International Writers' Program, at the University of Iowa in 1997, and the next year was Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago. He compiled and co-edited an anthology of Modern Egypt Poetry, Angry Voices, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2002.