Dilruba Z. Ara was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in a literary family. She studied in Dacca University and then in Gothenburg and Lund University. A List Offences, her debut novel, was first published by Dhaka University Press (2006) and subsequently the translation rights of the book were sold to Spanish Territories and Greece. The book hit the top ten list in South America together with Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns in February 2009, but the English version has not been available to general readers outside Indian Subcontinent until now. Ara’s short stories have been published to great acclaim in many international anthologies and are used as course material in universities around the world. Among Dilruba’s translated works are the Selected Short Stories of Shahed Ali.She has also translated some of Sweden’s well-known Pippi Longstocking stories into. Presently she is busy preparing a collection of short stories and revising her second novel set against the liberation war or Bangladesh. . Ara is also an accomplished artist and her paintings have been used as the covers for the Bengali, Greek and Kindle editions of A List of Offences.