Ghalya F T Al Said is a novelist from Oman who studied in both Oman and the UK, and has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Warwick. She has published poems, short stories and six novels. Her novels focus on immigrants in foreign, usually Western, settings and their attempts to cope and adapt to conflicting concepts of belief and culture. The Madness of Despair is her first novel to have been translated into English from its original Arabic and is one of four set in the UK. Her other novels include Days in Heaven (2005), Sabira and Asila (2007), Scattered Years (2008), The Tedium of Time (2015 and 2017) and District of the Blind (2019). She has opened a traditional Museum in Oman and plans to open a second one on culturally related themes.