Hala Saleh Al-Sayad is an Egyptian novelist and screenwriter, born in 1984 in Alexandria, Egypt. She graduated from the Fine Arts College of Alexandria University, before studying Filmmaking at the Jesuits Film School. She also studied Modernist Arts at MASS in Alexandria and Humanities and Translation at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS). Her first short film won Best Film at the international Alexandria Film Festival, and she was awarded a grant by the Centre of Arts at the Alexandria Library to produce her second short film, “Sweet Corn”, based upon a short story with the same name in her first published collection. Al-Sayad won second place in the Cairo Short Stories competition organized by the Goethe Institute in Cairo and then took part in Frankfurt Book Fair. She has so far published two short story collections and a novel, Emergency Exit (2022). The manuscript of her second novel Biography of Fear was awarded two grants from the Goethe Institute and the Belgian Mophradat Institute. As well as putting the final touches to this manuscript, she is currently involved in helping an Alexandrian writer and director make a film of her first novel. The screenplay has won two prizes from the Cairo Multaqa, part of the International Cairo Film Festival.