Certified life Coach since 2017 and an internationally-acclaimed author and I currently hold positions as writer in residence in the Netherlands. I was born in Rosso, Mauritania, the ninth of twelve children of a camel herder. My family moved to the capital of Nouakchott when I was a child, where I attended school and earned a scholarship to study electrical engineering at Gerhard-Mercator University in Duisburg, Germany. In 2001, I was living and working in the home country of Mauritania when I was detained and renditioned to Jordan, beginning an ordeal that I would chronicle in my internationally-bestselling Guantánamo Diary. The manuscript, which I wrote in the isolation cell in the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, remained classified for almost eight years and was finally released, with substantial redactions, in 2013. It was first published in the United States and United Kingdom in January, 2015, and has since been published in twenty-five languages. After fifteen years of detention, I was released on October 17 th , 2016 to Mauritania. The following year I published a “restored edition” of Guantánamo Diary, filling in the U.S. government’s redactions, and in 2021 the book was adapted for film as “The Mauritanian,” directed by Kevin MacDonald and starring Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, and Benedict Cumberbatch. In February 2021 my first novel, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, was published by Ohio University Press. My projects in the Netherlands include co-writing the theater production Yara’s Wedding, based on Edward Said’s Orientalism, which premiered in February 2023, and I was awarded the Netherlands PAX Peace Prize (Verededuif) in 2022 and The Marco Borradori Prize Lugao / Switzerland in September 2023.