Mathias Énard is a French writer. He was born in France in 1972, and visited, traveled and lived in various Arab-Muslim countries, including Lebanon, Syria and Iran. He studied Persian and Arabic, and in 2003 he settled in Barcelona, where he serves as an Arabic lecturer at the university. He has published nine books, which have been widely acclaimed and won numerous awards, the most known of which are “Zone” (2008) and “Compass”, which won the Goncourt Prize in 2015.
