Amal El-Mohtar, born in Ottawa in 1984, writes fiction, poetry and criticism. She has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for various short stories and for the novella This Is How You Lose the Time War, co-written with Max Gladstone, which received the BSFA and Aurora awards and became a New York Times bestseller, with translations into over ten languages. El- Mohtar has received multiple accolades for her poetry as well. The River Has Roots is her solo début novel.