Karim Miské was born in Abidjan in 1964 to a Mauritanian father and a French mother, and grew up in Paris before leaving to study journalism in Dakar. After returning to France, he spent twenty years making documentaries on a range of subjects including bioethics, deafness (for which he learnt sign language) and neo-fundamentalism in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. Arab jazz is his first novel.