Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian novelist and journalist. His first two novels were The Book of the Sultan's Seal (2011) and The Crocodiles (2013), both published in English in 2014 (by Interlink Books and Seven Stories Press in America). Paul Starkey’s English translation of The Book of Sultan’s Seal was awarded the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2015. His third novel, Paolo (part 2 of The Crocodiles) was published in 2016.