Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) was an Egyptian novelist who in 1988 became the first Arab writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in the al-Gamaliyya district of old Cairo — the setting of much of his fiction — he worked as a civil servant for decades while writing, publishing his first novels in the 1930s. His masterwork, the Cairo Trilogy (*Palace Walk*, *Palace of Desire*, *Sugar Street*, 1956–57), traced three generations of an Egyptian family from 1917 to 1944, establishing him as Egypt's Balzac. His later existentialist novels — especially *The Thief and the Dogs* (1961) — and his allegorical novella *Children of the Alley* (1959), which was banned in Egypt for 30 years for perceived blasphemy, showed his range. In 1994 he survived a stabbing attack by an Islamic extremist, suffering permanent nerve damage to his right hand. He dictated rather than wrote for his final decade. Naguib Mahfouz lived 1911 – 2006.