Yama Yari was born in Herat in 1982 and came to the United Kingdom in 1999. He is the co-translator, with Sarah Maguire, of A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, the second novel by Atiq Rahimi, Afghanistan’s most important living novelist (Chatto & Windus, 2006). A Thousand Rooms was long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.