Abdo Wazen is an award-winning author from Beirut, Lebanon. In addition to writing poetry and novels, he is also a French-to-Arabic translator and well-known culture editor of Al-Hayat newspaper. His first collection of poems, The Locked Forest, was published in 1982. Since then, Wazen has published a number of other poetry collections, and a memoir, An Open Heart, after he had major heart surgery in 2010. He has translated the poetry of Jacques Prevert and Nadia Twueni into Arabic. In 2005 he received the Culture Journalism Award from the Dubai Press Club and in 2012 he won the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award for his young adult novel The Boy Who Saw the Colour of Air.