Ali Mohammed Zaid is a Yemeni novelist, non-fiction writer and translator. He served as a Deputy Permanent Delegate of Yemen to UNESCO, Paris and later served the same organisation as a member of its secretariat as an international civil servant.
Among his published novels are Coffee Blossom; Metamorphoses of Place, The Bubble and Copenhagen at Our House (a work inspired by the arrival of Niebuhr’s Danish expedition in the eighteenth century to the author’s birthplace to explore Yemen’s coffee-growing regions, at a time when Yemen was the world’s sole exporter of coffee).
Some of his landmark non-fiction works are The Republican Culture in Yemen; Al-Baradoni-The Musician of Sorrow; The Mu‘tazilites of Yemen (A study of the school of Reason in ninth-century Yemen).
A doctorate in letters from the University of Paris-Sorbonne, he has translated several works from English and French works like the novel La Reine étripée by Habib Abdulrab; Revival and Reform in Islam, The Legacy of Mohamed al-Shawkani (Bernard Haykel), Jadawel, Beirut, 1997, etc.
He has been part of several think tanks and cultural foundations including the Yemen Center for Studies and Research, Al-Afif Cultural Foundation, and is now member of the board of trustees, Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies.
