Aref Hamza, born in 1974 in Al Hasakah/Syria, is considered to be one of the outstanding voices in contemporary Syrian poetry. He studied Law at the University of Aleppo and worked for many years in his hometown as a freelance writer and as a lawyer specialising in human rights. He published several collections of poetry in Arabic for which he won many awards, including in 2004 the prestigious Muhammed Al Maghout Prize for Poetry. Some of his poems have been translated into French, English Turkish, Kurdish and Spanish, among other languages. German translations of his poetry have been published in the collections “Weg sein – hier sein” (Secession Verlag, 2016) and “Deine Angst – Dein Paradies” (Verlag das Wunderhorn, 2018). In 2018 Secession Verlag published “Du bist nicht allein” in a bilingual version, in the original Arabic with a German translation by Sandra Hetzl. Aref Hamza lives with his family in Buchholz in the Nordheide.