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Khaled Khalifa () is a Syrian novelist, screenwriter and poet, born 1964 in Aleppo. His 2006 novel In Praise of Hatred (Madih al-Karahiya) has attracted worldwide media attention. It was a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and has been banned in Syria.

He attended the University of Aleppo, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in law. He wrote poetry and was a member of the Literary Forum there. As a screenwriter, Khalifa has written several television dramas including Rainbow (Kaws Kozah) and Memoirs of Al-Jalali (Serat Al-Jalali), documentaries, short films, and the feature-length film The Shrine Door (Bab al-Maqam). His first novel, The Guard of Deception (Haris al-Khadi'a), was published in 1993. His second novel, The Gypsy Notebooks (Dafatir al-Qurbat), was suppressed by the Union of Arab Writers for four years after its publication in 2000.

Khalifa spent thirteen years working on In Praise of Hatred, his third novel, which is about how the lives of one family are affected by the battle between the Syrian government and the Muslim Brotherhood. It was published in Damascus until the ban, when it was republished in Beirut. Khalifa says these sort of book bans come from a bureaucracy which does not represent the higher levels of government, and he favors negotiation between artists and Syrian authorities to facilitate freedom of speech.

As of 2009 he is working on a fourth novel, Parallel Life (Hayat Muwaziya).

His work is not intended to advocate any political ideology. Discussing In Praise of Hatred, he said "above all, I wrote this novel in defense of the Syrian people and in order to protest against the suffering they have endured as a result of the religious and political dogmas that have tried to negate their ten-thousand-year civilisation."

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Khaled Khalifa", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0