Naguib Mahfouz (1911 - 2006) was an Egyptian novelist, short story writer and screenwriter, and in 1988 the first author writing in Arabic to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. [1] Over a career of some seven decades he published around thirty-five novels and hundreds of short stories, most of them set in the streets and coffeehouses of Cairo. [2] His work brought the modern realist novel into Arabic literature and made the city itself his enduring subject. [3]
Early life and education
Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha was born on 11 December 1911 in the Gamaliya quarter of old Cairo, the youngest child of a civil servant. [1] He studied philosophy at Cairo University, graduating in 1934, and began a postgraduate degree before abandoning it for literature. [2] He entered the civil service in 1934 and worked in government for the rest of his professional life, serving in the Ministry of Religious Endowments and later in the state cinema administration and the Ministry of Culture, writing in the hours around his official duties.
Early fiction
His earliest novels, published from 1939, were set in pharaonic Egypt. [3] He soon turned to the modern city, producing a series of realist novels of Cairo life including Khan al-Khalili (1945), Midaq Alley (1947) and The Beginning and the End (1949), which follow ordinary families under economic pressure in tightly drawn urban quarters.
The Cairo Trilogy and after
His major achievement of this period was the trilogy published in 1956 and 1957 — Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street — which traces three generations of the Abd al-Jawad family from the First World War to the end of the Second. [1] The books combine domestic detail with the political currents of the era, from nationalist agitation to the appeal of communism and the Muslim Brotherhood, and established him as the leading novelist of the Arab world.
After the 1952 revolution he wrote little fiction for several years, returning with work that was more experimental and often more critical. [2] Children of Gebelawi (1959), serialised in the newspaper Al-Ahram, retells the history of the monotheistic faiths through the inhabitants of a Cairo alley; its allegory offended religious authorities and it was not published in book form in Egypt for decades.
Later novels such as The Thief and the Dogs (1961), Autumn Quail (1962) and Miramar (1967) used shifting viewpoints and interior monologue to examine disillusionment with the Nasser era. [3] He also worked extensively as a screenwriter, and many of his novels were adapted for Egyptian cinema and television.
Nobel Prize and later years
The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, citing work that "has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind." [1]
His public support for the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty drew criticism in parts of the Arab world, and the continuing controversy over Children of Gebelawi made him a target of religious extremists. [2] In October 1994 he was stabbed in the neck outside his Cairo home by an assailant; he survived, but nerve damage to his right hand severely limited his ability to write, and he composed little after that except short pieces dictated or written with difficulty.
Mahfouz died in the Cairo district of Agouza on 30 August 2006, aged ninety-four, and was given a state funeral. [3]
Legacy
Mahfouz is generally credited with establishing the novel as a central form in Arabic letters and with opening Arabic fiction to international readership. [1]
