Mohammad al-Assad is a Palestinian poet, novelist, literary critic and researcher. He is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, including Singing in Deep Vaults (Baghdad, 1974), and the author of six novels: the best-selling Children of the Dew (1990), translated into French, Portuguese, Greek and Hebrew, and republished in Jerusalem by Dar al-Fil in 2013, The Refugee Text (1999), The Lover's Gardens (2001), The Tree of Pleasures (2004), Sounds of Silence (2009) and Umm al-Zeinat Under the Carob Trees (2009).