Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 in Gamaliya, in the old quarter of Cairo, the youngest child of a devout Muslim family; the 1919 revolution against British rule, glimpsed from the windows of his childhood home, made a lasting impression. He studied philosophy at what is now Cairo University, and in 1934 entered the civil service, where he worked in various ministries until his retirement in 1971, writing in the evenings. His first novels were historical romances of ancient Egypt, but he soon turned to the city around him.

In the 1940s, in books such as Midaq Alley, he became the chronicler of Cairo’s lower middle class, and in the Cairo Trilogy (1956–57) he followed a merchant family across three generations, from the First World War to the 1940s, in a work often compared with the great European family sagas. Children of Gebelawi, serialised in 1959, retold the history of the prophetic religions as an allegory set in a Cairo alley; condemned by religious authorities, it was long unavailable in book form in Egypt. In the 1960s he moved toward shorter, more inward and symbolic novels, such as The Thief and the Dogs and Adrift on the Nile, often critical of the Nasser era. He also wrote short stories, screenplays and a long-running newspaper column.

In 1988 he became the first Arabic-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize. In 1994, years after Islamist militants had called for his death, he was stabbed in the neck outside his Cairo home; he survived, but with lasting damage to his writing hand. He continued to publish brief prose pieces almost until his death in 2006.