Tariq Ali is a writer and film-maker. He has written over a dozen books on world history and politics and plays for both stage and screen. The first novel of his Islam Quartet, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, has been translated into several languages and was awarded the Archbishop San Clemente del Instituto Rosalia Prize for the Best Foreign Language Fiction published in Spain in 1994. the third, The Stone Woman, was published by Verso in 2000.