Naguib Mahfouz
1911 – 2006 · Egypt
Known for: Egyptian novelist of Cairo and the first writer in Arabic to win the Nobel Prize
“He wrote the lanes of Cairo until they became a map of the whole human world.”
Biography
Naguib Mahfouz was born on 11 December 1911 in the Gamaleya quarter of old Cairo, the seventh and youngest child of a civil servant of modest means, his siblings so much older that he grew up effectively alone. His mother, who could not read, took him repeatedly to the Egyptian Museum and the Pyramids. The household was strictly religious, and he said later that no one would have expected an artist to come out of it. He was seven during the Egyptian revolution of 1919 and watched from a window as British soldiers fired on demonstrators, an event he named as what most shook the security of his childhood. In 1930 he entered the Egyptian University to read philosophy, graduated in 1934, and within two years gave up a master's degree to write.
Like his father he joined the civil service and stayed in it until 1971, working in the ministry of religious endowments, then as a censor in the bureau of arts, later in the state film foundation and the ministry of culture, and writing in the hours around the job. His first books were historical novels set in ancient Egypt, part of a projected series on the whole national past that he abandoned after three volumes. What followed was his great subject: the crowded lanes of Cairo, ordinary families, and the pressure of modern life on people who had not asked for it. The Cairo Trilogy, named after three streets, follows one patriarch and his family through three generations, from the First World War to 1944. Awlad Haratina, known in English as Children of Gebelawi and serialised in Al-Ahram in 1959, was read as an allegory of the prophets and was banned in Egypt for decades.
Over some seventy years he published more than thirty novels, some 350 short stories, screenplays, plays and a weekly newspaper column, and no Egyptian writer's work has been filmed more often. In 1988 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the only Egyptian to have done so; the Swedish Academy said that he had formed an Egyptian narrative art that applies to all mankind. In 1994 an extremist stabbed him in the neck outside his Cairo home; he survived, but the injury damaged the nerves of his right hand and afterwards he could write only a few minutes at a time. He worked on regardless, dictating and receiving friends in the cafes he had used all his life, until his death in Cairo on 30 August 2006, aged ninety four. The lane, which he called a microcosm of the world, remains one of the most inhabited landscapes in Arabic literature.