How do we concatenate using blade template engine Laravel

I am new to Laravel and don't know if it is possible at all to concatenate a string to a blade variable.

I want to display the name of the author with the ~ sign concatenated to the author's name from the left. Here is my code.

<div class="author">~</div>

What I want is if the author is set, it should be displayed with the ~. How do I concatenate this? Thanks for any help

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