Alexander Ilichevsky has been publishing newspaper articles, essays, and novels since the 1990s. His work has been honored with numerous prizes, including the Russian Booker Prize. He grew up in Azerbaijan, studied and taught theoretical physics in Moscow and then emigrated to California in the mid-1990s. He has lived in Jerusalem since 2013. Die Perser, the German translation of his multi-award-winning novel Pers, was published in 2016, followed by Jerusalem: Stadt der untergehenden Sonne [Jerusalem: City of the Setting Sun] in 2017.