Naguib Mahfouz

Born on December 11, 1911, in the Gamaliya quarter of Cairo, a labyrinthine old neighborhood whose narrow alleys and ancient mosques would become the recurring landscape of his fiction, Naguib Mahfouz was the youngest of seven children in a lower-middle-class family. His father was a civil servant, and the boy grew up during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, whose nationalist fervor left a permanent mark on his imagination. He studied philosophy at Cairo University (then King Fuad I University), graduating in 1934, and briefly considered pursuing an academic career before committing himself entirely to literature. He worked as a civil servant in various government ministries for over three decades, writing in the early mornings before heading to the office. His early historical novels gave way to the social realism of The Cairo Trilogy , Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957) , an epic portrait of three generations of a Cairo family from World War I to the 1952 revolution, widely regarded as the greatest work of Arabic prose fiction. Children of Gebelawi (1959), an allegorical retelling of the lives of Adam, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, was serialized in Al-Ahram but banned in book form in Egypt for its perceived blasphemy, a controversy that foreshadowed the assassination attempt against him in 1994, when an Islamist extremist stabbed him in the neck outside his Cairo home, permanently damaging the nerves in his right arm. In 1988 he became the first Arabic-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He published thirty-five novels, over 350 short stories, and numerous screenplays over a seventy-year career. He died on August 30, 2006, in Cairo, at the age of ninety-four.