Raphael Cormack has a PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies with a focus on Egyptian theatre from the University of Edinburgh. He is currently Assistant Professor in Arabic Studies at Durham University. An award-winning editor and translator, Cormack is the editor of The Book of Cairo and the co-editor of The Book of Khartoum. His writing on Arab culture has appeared in the London Review of Books, Prospect and TLS, among others. Raphael Cormack is the author of Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring ’20s, an exploration of Cairo popular culture through personalities such as Rose Al-Youssef, Mounira al-Mahdiyya and Oum Kalthoum.