Naguib Mahfouz | Egyptian writer | Britannica.com Egyptian writer Luigi Pirandello Naguib Mahfouz, also spelled Najīb Maḥfūẓ (born December 11, 1911, Cairo , Egypt —died August 30, 2006, Cairo), Egyptian novelist and screenplay writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, the first Arabic writer to be so honoured. Mahfouz was the son of a civil servant and grew up in Cairo’s Al-Jamāliyyah district. He attended the Egyptian University (now Cairo University), where in 1934 he received a degree in philosophy. He worked in the Egyptian civil service in a variety of positions from 1934 until his retirement in 1971. Mahfouz’s earliest published works were short stories.

His early novels, such as Rādūbīs (1943; “Radobis”), were set in ancient Egypt , but he had turned to describing modern Egyptian society by the time he began his major work, Al-Thulāthiyyah (1956–57), known as The Cairo Trilogy . Its three novels—Bayn al-qaṣrayn (1956; Palace Walk), Qaṣr al-shawq (1957; Palace of Desire), and Al-Sukkariyyah (1957; Sugar Street)—depict the lives of three generations of different families in Cairo from World War I until after the 1952 military coup that overthrew King Farouk . The trilogy provides a penetrating overview of 20th-century Egyptian thought, attitudes, and social change. In subsequent works Mahfouz offered critical views of the old Egyptian monarchy, British colonialism, and contemporary Egypt. Several of his more notable novels deal with social issues involving women and political prisoners.

His novel Awlād ḥāratinā (1959; Children of the Alley) was banned in Egypt for a time because of its controversial treatment of religion and its use of characters based on Muhammad, Moses, and other figures. Islamic militants, partly because of their outrage over the work, later called for his death, and in 1994 Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck. Mahfouz’s other novels include Al-Liṣṣ wa-al-kilāb (1961; The Thief and the Dogs), Al-Shaḥḥādh (1965; The Beggar), and Mīrāmār (1967; Miramar), all of which consider Egyptian society under Gamal Abdel Nasser ’s regime; Afrāḥ al-qubba (1981; Wedding Song), set among several characters associated with a Cairo theatre company; and the structurally experimental Ḥadīth al-ṣabāḥ wa-al-masāʾ (1987; Morning and Evening Talk), which strings together in alphabetical order dozens of character sketches.

Together, his novels, which were among the first to gain widespread acceptance in the Arabic-speaking world, brought the genre to maturity within Arabic literature . Mahfouz’s achievements as a short-story writer are demonstrated in such collections as Dunyā Allāh (1963; God’s World). The Time and the Place, and Other Stories (1991) and The Seventh Heaven (2005) are collections of his stories in English translation. Mahfouz wrote more than 45 novels and short-story collections, as well as some 30 screenplays and several plays. Aṣdāʾ al-sīrah al-dhātiyyah (1996; Echoes of an Autobiography) is a collection of parables and his sayings. In 1996 the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature was established to honour Arabic writers.

Learn More in these related articles: Nobel Prize in Literature 1988 - Press Release Press Release The Nobel Prize in Literature 1988 Naguib Mahfouz The Nobel Prize in Literature 1988 Naguib Mahfouz Through the Swedish Academy's decision this year the Nobel Prize in Literature has for the first time been awarded to an Egyptian. Naguib Mahfouz was born and lives in Cairo. He is also the first literary Nobel Prizewinner with Arabic as his native tongue. To date Mahfouz has been writing for about fifty years. At the age of 77 he is still indefatigable. Mahfouz's great and decisive achievement is as the writer of novels and short stories. His production has meant a powerful upswing for the novel as a genre and for the development of the literary language in Arabic-speaking cultural circles. The range is however greater than that. His work speaks to us all. The earliest novels are set in the Pharaonic milieu of ancient Egypt. But here already there are side-long glances at today's society. A series of Cairo novels takes place at the present day. To them belongs Midaq Alley (1947).

The alley becomes a stage, which holds together a motley crowd, all drawn with telling psychological realism. Mahfouz really made his name with the big Trilogy (1956-57). In the centre is a family and its vicissitudes from the end of the 1910s to the middle of the 1940s. The series of novels has autobiographical elements. The depiction of the individuals relates very clearly to intellectual, social and political conditions. On the whole through his writings Mahfouz has exerted considerable influence in his country. The theme of the unusual novel Children of Gebelawi (1959) is man's everlasting search for spiritual values. Adam and Eve, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and others, as well as the modern scientist, appear thinly disguised. It is the scientist who ultimately is responsible for the primeval father Gebelawi's (God's) death. Different norm systems are confronted with tension in the description of the conflict between good and evil. On account of the way in which higher things are treated the book could not be printed in the author's own country but was published elsewhere.

A Houseboat on the Nile (1966 - not yet translated into English) is an example of Mahfouz's impressive novellas. Here metaphysical conversations are carried on in the borderland between reality and illusion. At the same time the text forms itself into a comment on the intellectual climate in the country. Mahfouz is also an excellent short story writer. In the volume of selected stories God's World (1973) we get a very good view of what he has achieved in this field. The artistic treatment of the existential questions is forceful and the formal solutions often striking. There has been a tendency to divide Mahfouz's writings into a number of periods, e.g. a historical, a realistic and a metaphysical-mystical. Naturally this has not happened without reason. However, the illumination throughout of human life in general should also be emphasized. "If the urge to write should ever leave me", Mahfouz said in an interview recently, "I want that day to be my last." Share this: To cite this page MLA style: "Nobel Prize in Literature 1988 - Press Release". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014.

Web. 19 Jan 2017. < Naguib Mahfouz | Books | The Guardian Books Naguib Mahfouz Egyptian novelist and first Arab Nobel laureate who sprang to world attention with his depictions of life in Cairo's old city Naguib Mahfouz. Photograph: EPA Share on Messenger Close The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz , who has died aged 94, was the Arab world's most prominent literary figure. Neglected in the west, modern Arabic literature achieved international recognition when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988, and it is difficult to think of any winner of the prize whose status as a writer was so dramatically changed as that of Mahfouz by the award. From being a writer known only in the Arab world and to a handful of Orientalists, he sprang to world attention. Whereas previously no major publisher in England or America was prepared to publish his work, overnight he was taken up by a leading American publishing house and became a bestseller. His novels were then quickly translated into many languages.

Born in Gamaliya in the old city of Cairo, the son of a minor official, the writer spent his first years in the distinctive medieval atmosphere with its narrow lanes, clustered overhanging buildings and picturesque artisans. Its features became part of his consciousness and are brought to life in some of his early realistic novels and, more particularly, in The Cairo Trilogy on which, both in the Arab world and in the west, his fame in great part rests. Mahfouz's life was ordered and singularly devoid of variety or dramatic happenings - if one is to exclude the 1994 assassination attempt by a young extremist from which the writer miraculously escaped with his life. He received a traditional education at a kuttab (Koranic school), then at primary and secondary schools, where he read many of the great works of classical Arabic literature and mastered the Arabic language with its complicated grammar and syntax. Having graduated in philosophy from Cairo University in 1934 he then began an MA in philosophy, which he abandoned when he decided to make a career of writing. Realising that writing must inevitably be part-time, he joined the civil service until his retirement in 1971.

Among the posts he held were director of the film censorship office and, finally, adviser to the culture minister. On into the 1980s, Mahfouz supplemented his income by writing film scenarios, yet while more than 30 films were made from his novels, he refused to adapt his own work for the screen. On his retirement he joined the group of distinguished writers, among whom was the playwright Tawfik al-Hakim, at Egypt's leading newspaper al-Ahram. From then on his novels were first serialised in the pages of the newspaper before being brought out in book form. Having perforce to earn his living as a civil servant, Mahfouz acquired the necessary discipline to organise his time so that he would be able both to read widely and to produce a considerable corpus of fictional writing. Even feeling that marriage might prove a hindrance, he delayed marrying until the age of 43. He wrote more than 30 novels. His first attempts were three novels with Pharaonic backgrounds, the first being The Curse of Ra (1939).

Next came a period of social realism as seen in novels like Midaq Alley (1947), an entertainingly vivid depiction of the alleyways of his youth and the extraordinary characters that inhabit them: the hashish-smoking cafe-owner Kirsha, and Zaita, the "fashioner of deformities", who performs maiming operations on those wishing to take up a life of begging. Then, in 1956, Palace Walk, the first volume of The Cairo Trilogy, came out, to be followed a year later by the other two volumes, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street. A novel on the grand scale of some 1,500 pages, the trilogy deals with three generations of the Abd al-Jawad family and extends from 1917 to just before the end of the second world war. During this time Egypt was engaged in a struggle for independence from British rule. The three volumes describe in minute detail the daily events in a middle-class Egyptian family, recording for history as no other book does, a way of life that has disappeared under the impact of western influence and the pressures of modern life. The political happenings of the times are interwoven into the lives of the many characters.

Members of the protagonist family represent the main trends in the political life of the country: the Wafd party, with its heroes Saad Zaghloul and Mustafa Nahhas (the party with which Mahfouz associated himself), the burgeoning socialist movement as exemplified by the writings of Salama Mousa, and the beginnings of a fundamental Islamic movement. The myriad characters and events are handled with great skill and the writer is seen throughout to be in complete control of his material. It was a remarkable achievement, in particular when one bears in mind that the Arabic novel had only recently come into being. The Trilogy quickly became a bestseller in the Arab world, and those who could not read it came to know its characters through the films that were made of it; that it could also be appreciated outside its own cultural confines is shown by the fact that in the United States the Trilogy achieved sales of more than 250,000 copies. Though not published until 1956-57, the Trilogy was completed before the 1952 revolution of Gamal Abdul Nasser. Mahfouz was disillusioned by the revolution and the repressive era that it introduced. Unable to criticise it, he preferred to remain silent.

Then in 1957 he started work on Children of Our Alley (which was translated into English as Children of Gebelawi). It was the novel that brought its author into conflict with Egypt's religious authorities. After its serialisation in al-Ahram, al-Azhar, Cairo's religious university, refused to allow the work to appear in book form. In a society with religious susceptibilities, exception was taken to a novel dealing with issues that were considered not acceptable subjects for fiction. Later the novel came out in Beirut and until today is available in Egypt only under the counter. Many years later it became the reason for the attack on his life on October 14, 1994, in which he was hospitalised with a wound to the neck, leaving him partially paralysed in his right arm. The novel shows a departure in his approach, being written in an episodic form, a form that he was to adopt later in other works. While the themes that preoccupy him often repeat themselves, Mahfouz continued throughout his career to seek new techniques.

Children of Our Alley is an allegory in which God appears in the character of Gebelawi, Adam as "Adham", while other characters represent the prophets Jesus and Muhammad. Though a new translation was published by the American publisher Doubleday in 1996, a decision was taken not to make it available in Egypt. Other novels which are of particular interest include The Harafish (1977): it too is written in episodic form and takes place in an alleyway of Cairo's old city. It deals with several generations of the same family, universalising the alleyway into an image of the human condition. The myth here is of his own invention, unlike his use of the fall of Adam in Children of Our Alley. Mahfouz was widely read in western fiction and particularly admired Flaubert, Stendhal, and Proust, and Melville's Moby Dick.

His borrowings from the west in matters of technique can be seen in his novel Miramar (1967), published in 1967, in which - following Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet - he relates the story of several characters staying in a pension in the seaside city of Alexandria, recounting the same incidents from the point of view of four different characters. The book was published in English in 1978 with a perceptive introduction by John Fowles who, at this relatively early date, saw in Mahfouz "a significant novelist". Published in 1979 and then in English in 1995, Arabian Nights and Days is yet another novel to be written in the episodic form which Mahfouz came to favour. In it he chooses tales from the classic Thousand and One Nights and reforges them into narratives dealing with those themes that have always occupied him: good and evil, man's social responsibility, and, increasingly with time, death. The novel is set in an Arabian Nights atmosphere, but many of the issues relate to Egypt's present problems: the corruption of those in power, social justice and the rise of the fundamentalist movement.

Hardly had Miramar appeared when the Israeli victory in the 1967 six-days war, a defeat that was as humiliating as it was unexpected, rocked the Arab world. Mahfouz's reaction was to give up writing novels for five years. During this period Mahfouz added to the total of 14 volumes of short stories that he published, often with stories of singular blackness that matched his mood. His contribution to the Arabic short story is often forgotten in the face of his overwhelming achievement in the novel. Among his collected works in English is a single volume of stories under the title The Time and the Place (1992). One of the stories represented in this volume, Zaabalawi, has found itself included in the Norton Masterpieces of the World as the only piece of Arabic writing, apart from some extracts from the Koran. His very first at writing fiction were short stories, which he was delighted to find being accepted and appearing in print. He recounts how one day an editor asked him to pass by the office. He did so and was handed a pound for his latest story. "One gets paid as well!" exclaimed the budding writer in disbelief.

His last novel was Qushtumar (1988) and his last published work was another collection of short stories, The Seventh Heaven (2005) which dealt with the afterlife. He wanted, he observed, to believe that something good would happen to him after his death. Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times. Neither the fame nor the considerable monetary reward afforded by the Nobel Prize altered his life. He continued to live in his modest flat in the middle-class district of Agouza with his wife and two daughters and changed nothing in his daily routine. He remained until the day of his death, by then a frail old man with failing sight and hearing, a modest man with a ready smile and that sense of humour for which Egyptians are famous.

John Ezard writes: In 1990, when he was a physically wasted, half-blind yet zestful 79-year-old, I interviewed Naguib Mahfouz in the Ali Baba cafe overlooking Cairo's central Tahrir Square, where he breakfasted for 40 years and which he had seen change from a Nile-side preserve of the rich to a demotic chaos. "The square has had many scenes," he said. "It used to be more quiet. Now it is disturbing but more progressive, better for ordinary people - and therefore better for me also, as one who likes his fellow humans." Any country is fortunate if it produces citizens like him. · Naguib Mahfouz, writer, born December 11 1911; died August 30 2006 Nobel-Winning Author Naguib Mahfouz Dies at 94 : NPR Nobel-Winning Author Naguib Mahfouz Dies at 94 Embed Embed Nobel-Winning Author Naguib Mahfouz Dies at 94 Nobel-Winning Author Naguib Mahfouz Dies at 94 Embed Embed Heard on Morning Edition Mona Iskander Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz has died.

He was 94. Mahfouz was the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature. He is credited with perfecting the novel-form in the Arabic language, succeeding where others had failed. Mahfouz was known for lively prose used to depict everyday life in Cairo. STEVE INSKEEP, host: The only writer to win a Nobel Prize for his stories in Arabic has died. Naguib Mahfouz was 94 years old. He'd gone to the hospital last month after he fell in his home. As we're going to hear, Naguib Nahfouz wrote novels that painted the streets of Cairo, Egypt so you could almost see them. Mona Iskander begins her report on those streets. (Soundbite of Cairo street sounds) MONA ISKANDER reporting: In this bustling Cairo square, a statue of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz stands above the traffic with one foot poised forward as if in motion, and one on clutching his signature walking cane. He wears tinted glasses he sported for most of his life. It seems natural that a statue of Mahfouz stands here amid the ordinary activities of Cairoian life.

The inspirations for his narratives were right here in the surrounding neighborhoods. Many of his stories bring these places to life through eloquent descriptions. This is a passage from his novel Palace Walk, when one of the characters, Yasin, returns to the neighborhood of his birth. Unidentified Man: (Reading) The street was still so narrow, a handcart will almost block it when passing by. The protruding balconies of the houses almost touched each other overhead. The small shops resembled the cells of a beehive; they were so close together and crowded with patrons, so noisy and humming. The street was unpaved, with gaping holes full of mud. The boys who swarmed along the sides of the streets made footprints in the dirt with their bare feet. There is the same never-ending stream of pedestrian traffic. Uncle Hassan's snack shop and Uncle Soliman's restaurant, too, remain just as he'd known them. ISKANDER: Mahfouz grew up in a very similar setting. He was born in 1911 in the Gamala district of Cairo to a modest, middleclass family. He later served as a government employee until he began writing professionally in his 40s.

Mahfouz is often referred to as the father of the Arabic novel. Some of his books are Midaq Alley, The Cairo Trilogy, and The Beginning and the End. Egyptian writers like Mahfouz had attempted novel writing, but it was he who mastered it and brought it to maturity in the Arabic language. Raymond Stock, a writer and translator, is writing a biography on Mahfouz. Mr. RAYMOND STOCK (Writer and Translator): Well, he sort of invented the modern literary prose style in Arabic. He has found a way to - and he was the first, I think, to really do this - capture the feeling and the spirit of colloquial Egyptian, in classical Arabic. So when he writes his dialogue it sounds like natural speech. He's quite a genius in that respect. ISKANDER: controversy entered Mahfouz' life for the publication of his novel, Children of the Alley. Islamic clerks issued a Fatua against him for his alleged use of religious characters in the book. In 1994, Islamic militants stabbed him in the neck. The incident left Mahfouz' right arm crippled. After five years of physical therapy, he was able to write again.

His work took on a more autobiographical tone. Despite the attack, Mahfouz continues to frequent his favorite cafes for those closest to him. Ali Salam, a playwright, is one of the many who sat for hours, drinking tea and discussing politics and current events with Mahfouz. Salam believes that Mahfouz' greatest talent was transforming the ordinary into the evocative. Mr. ALI SALAM (Playwright): The words themselves, in his works are dancing, and they are decisive, expressive. You feel that you are listening to a piece of good music. So I think people will read him forever because of this music, because his musical style makes you feel that the Arabic language is beautiful. ISKANDER: For NPR News, I'm Mona Iskander. (Soundbite of music) INSKEEP: This is NPR News. Copyright © 2006 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc. , an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future.

Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. Egyptian First Arab to Win Nobel Prize for Literature - latimes Egyptian First Arab to Win Nobel Prize for Literature October 14, 1988 |From Times Wire Services STOCKHOLM — Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, an Arabic storyteller who chronicled the search for human values from the Nile Delta of the Pharaohs to the back alleys of modern Cairo, Thursday was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. Mahfouz, 77, the first Arab writer to win the award in its 87-year history, has been compared to Charles Dickens for his vivid portrayals of poverty. One book of his was banned in Egypt, and another attacked former President Gamal Abdel Nasser's domestic and pan-Arabist policies.

The Swedish Academy said that Mahfouz, who has written 40 novels and short-story collections, was awarded the prize because of works "rich in nuance--now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively am-biguous." It commended his work for contributing to "a powerful upswing for the novel as a genre and for the development of the literary language in Arabic-speaking cultural circles." "His work speaks to us all," the academy said. Mahfouz also is credited with more than 30 screenplays, about a dozen of them based on his novels. He told Egypt's state-run news agency in Cairo: "I am extremely happy for myself and for Arabic literature. The news was a complete surprise to me. . . . I hope this will be the first step for our literary generations." Recent Trend Continues The award continued a recent trend of the 18-member body to seek laureates outside the mainstream of European and American literature. Wole Soyinka of Nigeria was honored in 1986. Exiled Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky won last year. Mahfouz, the son of a Cairo civil servant, has shown little admiration for contemporary Arab writers, including himself.

Once asked to appraise his work, he said: "Probably like the rest of modern Arabic literature, fourth or fifth rate." The 1988 prize is worth $390,000, but it inevitably brings a further bonus in royalties and prestige. Sigrid Kahle, a Swedish specialist in Arabic literature, said Mahfouz could probably use both. "At his age, he can't support himself as an author, and he's not lacking for enemies," she said. The Egyptian laureate said his frail condition might keep him away from the Swedish capital, and one of his two daughters or another representative may accept the prize in Stockholm on Dec. 10. Though widely read at home, Mahfouz's realism and his reputation as a "free thinker" dampened his popularity over the years. Commentator Lotfi Kholi, a friend and colleague of Mahfouz at Al Ahram, Egypt's semiofficial newspaper, said the Nobel laureate's books had at one time or another upset both Muslim and political leaders.

He cited three novels, "The Thief and the Dog" in 1961, "Chatting on the Nile" in 1966 and "Miramar" in 1967, which attacked Nasser's revolution. "The books spoke of the shortcomings of dictatorship at a time when no voice dared to speak out against Nasser's regime," Kholi said. Upset Egyptian Army Mahfouz also upset the powerful Egyptian army with his 1974 book "Al Karnak," about army intelligence scandals. The book later became a popular movie. Egyptian censors banned his 1959 novel, "Children of Gebelawi," which touched on religious themes not acceptable for publication in Egypt. But President Hosni Mubarak and other officials sent congratulations Thursday. Some of Mahfouz's earlier novels were set in ancient Egypt, but took sidelong looks at modern society, the academy said. The academy also cited "God's World," a collection of stories. "The artistic treatment of the existential questions is forceful and the formal solutions often striking," the announcement said.

Daily Routine Mahfouz routinely visits a coffee shop in Cairo's Khan Khalili bazaar for an hour, then writes from 9 a.m. until noon in his office at Al Ahram, for which he writes weekly social and political commentaries. He then takes an afternoon nap, but his wife, Attiyatallah, interrupted him Thursday to tell him of the award. "He always felt he would never win it, but . . . I've been sure he would," she said. "When I woke him up to give him the news, he couldn't believe it and told me to stop joking." The Nobel prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry and economics will be announced next week. U.N. peacekeeping forces won the Nobel Peace Prize, announced Sept. 29 in Oslo, Norway. Hopes rise for a wider audience in the West for Arab literature. Story in View.

MORE: Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded to an Arabic Writer for First Time - NYTimes.com Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded to an Arabic Writer for First Time By SHEILA RULE Published: October 14, 1988 Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian novelist, playwright and screenwriter, won the Nobel Prize in Literature today, becoming the first Arabic writer to win literature's highest award. The Swedish Academy of Letters said in its announcement that Mr. Mahfouz, ''through works rich in nuance - now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous - has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind.''Mr. Mahfouz's body of writing ''speaks to us all,'' the academy said. Mr. Mahfouz, who once described himself as ''a fourth- or fifth-rate writer,'' is the author of 40 novels and collections of short stories, several plays and more than 30 screenplays. About a dozen of his books have been translated into English, although not all are still in print.

The writer, who is 77 years old, was a strong supporter of President Anwar el-Sadat's peace treaty with Israel and although his writing is highly popular in Arabic-speaking nations, his books were officially banned in many Arab countries for a time because of his support for the peace treaty. Barukh Binah, the Israeli press officer at the United Nations and at the Israeli consulate in New York, said Mr. Mahfouz was considered a good neighbor of Israel and applauded the academy's decision. In 1981 one of Mr. Mahfouz's plays, ''Small Talk on the Nile,'' was produced by a theater in Haifa. ''The Cairo Trilogy,'' one of his major works, was translated into Hebrew and published in Israel. Lotfi el-Kholi, a friend of the writer, said Mr. Mahfouz's books had at one time or another upset both religious and political leaders. Mr. Kholi said three of Mr.

Mafouz's novels - ''The Thief and the Dogs'' (1961), ''Chatting on the Nile'' (1966) and ''Miramar'' (1967) - had attacked the military coup that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power in Egypt in 1952. ''The books spoke of the shortcomings of dictatorship at a time when no voice dared to speak out against Nasser's regime,'' Mr. Kholi said. One Novel Barred in Egypt One novel, ''Children of Gabalawi,'' published in 1959 with the theme of man's everlasting search for spiritual values, was barred in Egypt because of its controversial treatment of religion. The book included characters based on Adam and Eve, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, as well as a modern scientist. This year's Nobel Prize carries a cash award of about $390,000. The formal presentation for Nobel laureates from all fields is Dec. 10. Two of the 18 members of the academy said in interviews that Mr. Mahfouz had been considered in previous years. Prof.

Sture Allen, secretary of the Swedish Academy, said it was ''very, very rare'' for a writer to be awarded the prize when he was first nominated because of the extensive reading and research involved. A total of 150 writers reportedly were nominated this year, and Mr. Allen said five were finalists. In keeping with the academy's tradition of secrecy, he declined to identify the others. But Swedish publishers and cultural editors said some of the longstanding front-runners included Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer; Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet; V. S. Naipaul, the novelist who was born in Trinidad and lives in Britain, and Milan Kundera, the Czechoslovak novelist. This year's decision by the academy, which has been criticized on the ground of often choosing elderly or obscure laureates, came as a surprise to members of literary circles here, some of whom gathered to hear the announcement in a room of the academy in the Stock Exchange building in the Old Town. There was a jubilant reaction to last year's announcement that the winner was Joseph Brodsky, the exiled Soviet-born poet now living in New York City, but today publishers and literary critics dispersed quietly and quickly.

An Absence of Rumors One said later that she and others had immediately gone searching for copies of Mr. Mahfouz's writings in local bookstores. They eventually found a copy of a work first published in 1957 that was on the sale rack in a store that specialized in used books. There were suggestions before today's announcement that the fact that there were no rumors about the probable choice could have meant that Mr. Mahfouz was a last-minute choice. Mr. Allen said, however, that the lack of rumors was the result of recent efforts by the academy to be more tight-lipped about its decision. Several Swedish literary figures said the selection of Mr. Mahfouz fit the academy's pattern of trying to encompass varying styles, languages and cultures with the award. Son of a Civil Servant ''They try to spread the wealth,'' one publisher said. ''If a poet wins one year, it's a fairly safe bet that a poet won't win the next year. If an American author had it recently, it would be unlikely that another American would get it in the near future.

But it's pretty impossible for an author to get it if he has not been published in a Western language because the academy would not want to rely on just the good word spoken by such an author's compatriots.'' Mr. Mahfouz, who lives in Cairo, was born in 1911, the son of a civil servant. The academy noted that little was known about his personal life because he gives few interviews. But it quoted him as saying that he ''learned to believe in science, socialism and tolerance'' at an early age. He worked in the cultural section of the Egyptian civil service from 1934 until his retirement in 1971. The new laureate made his name as a novelist with a broadly conceived trilogy, published in 1956 and 1957, which centers on a Cairene family. Parts bear names from Cairo's oldest streets and quarters. His depiction of the city has been compared by critics with Dickens's London, Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg and Zola's Paris. Glances at the Modern World Mr. Mahfouz's earliest novels are set in ancient Egypt but include glances at today's society.

They are seen as critical of the British occupation during World War II, contemporary Egypt's political and social conditions and King Farouk's dictatorial rule. ''A Houseboat on the Nile,'' published in 1966 but not translated into English, is considered a prime example of Mr. Mahfouz's novellas. ''God's World,'' published in 1973, is viewed as an example of his achievement as a short-story writer. ''If the urge to write should ever leave me,'' Mr. Mahfouz said in a recent interview, ''I want that day to be my last.'' Naguib Mahfouz - Biographical Naguib Mahfouz The Nobel Prize in Literature 1988 Naguib Mahfouz Share this: Naguib Mahfouz - Biographical Born in Cairo in 1911, Naguib Mahfouz began writing when he was seventeen. His first novel was published in 1939 and ten more were written before the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952, when he stopped writing for several years.

One novel was republished in 1953, however, and the appearance of the Cairo Triology, Bayn al Qasrayn, Qasr al Shawq, Sukkariya (Between-the-Palaces, Palace of Longing, Sugarhouse) in 1957 made him famous throughout the Arab world as a depictor of traditional urban life. With The Children of Gebelawi (1959), he began writing again, in a new vein that frequently concealed political judgements under allegory and symbolism. Works of this second period include the novels, The Thief and the Dogs (1961), Autumn Quail (1962), Small Talk on the Nile (1966), and Miramar (1967), as well as several collections of short stories. Until 1972, Mahfouz was employed as a civil servant, first in the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, as Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and, finally, as consultant on Cultural Affairs to the Ministry of Culture.

The years since his retirement from the Egyptian bureaucracy have seen an outburst of further creativity, much of it experimental. He is now the author of no fewer than thirty novels, more than a hundred short stories, and more than two hundred articles. Half of his novels have been made into films which have circulated throughout the Arabic-speaking world. In Egypt, each new publication is regarded as a major cultural event and his name is inevitably among the first mentioned in any literary discussion from Gibraltar to the Gulf. From Les Prix Nobel . The Nobel Prizes 1988, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1989 This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/ Nobel Lectures / The Nobel Prizes . The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. Naguib Mahfouz died on August 30, 2006. Nagib Mahfuz | Article about Nagib Mahfuz by The Free Dictionary Nagib Mahfuz | Article about Nagib Mahfuz by The Free Dictionary Also found in: Wikipedia .

Mahfouz, Naguib (nəgēb` mäkhfo͞os`), 1911–2006, Egyptian novelist and short-story writer, b. Cairo. After his graduation (1934) from Cairo Univ., he worked in various government ministries until his retirement in 1971. Mahfouz was the best-known and most widely respected 20th-century writer in Egypt and probably in the whole Arab world, where many of his works were adapted for film and television. His novels are characterized by realistic depictions of Egyptian social, political, and religious life in the troubled 20th cent. His fiction features a wide variety of ordinary citizens, usually inhabitants of Cairo, and includes explorations of such issues as the position of women and the treatment of political prisoners. Stylistically, his works rejuvenated literary Arabic, and in 1988 he became the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In all, Mahfouz wrote 33 novels, 16 short story collections, several plays, 30 screenplays, and a variety of other works.

However, much of his reputation is based on his 1956–57 "Cairo Trilogy"—Bayn al-Qasrayn, Qasr ash-Shawq, and As-Sukkariyya (tr. as Palace Walk, 1989, Palace of Desire, 1991, and Sugar Street, 1992)—a sweeping series of novels that traces the history of a middle-class Cairo Muslim family through three generations, from 1917 to 1952. Another well-known novel, Awlad Haratina (1959; tr. Children of Gebelawi, 1981, Children of the Alley, 1995), a semibiblical allegory, includes characters identified with Muhammad, Jesus, Adam and Eve, and Moses. Considered blasphemous by some, it remains controversial in the Arabic-speaking world and was banned in Egypt. In the 1960s Mahfouz abandoned some of his realistic techniques and began to write shorter, faster-paced novels with stream of consciousness narratives and scriptlike dialogue, e.g., The Search (1964, tr. 1991).

His other novels include Midaq Alley (1947, tr. 1975) and Miramar (1967, tr. 1978). Among his short stories are those in God's World (tr. 1973). Mahfouz was an outspoken advocate of peace between Egypt and Israel, a position that made him a controversial figure in his homeland. In 1994 he was stabbed in an assassination attempt, apparently by an Islamic fundamentalist. Weakened by age, further debilitated by the attack, and unable to write longer pieces, during his late 80s he began to compose extremely brief dream-based vignettes; a number of them were serialized in Egypt and later collected in The Dreams (2005). Bibliography See his Echoes of an Autobiography (1997) and Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber: Reflections of a Nobel Laureate 1994–2001 (2001); studies by S. Somekh (1973), M. Peled (1983), H. Gordon (1990), T.

Le Gassick, ed. (1991), M. Beard and A. Haydar, ed. (1993), R. El-Enany (1993), M. Moosa (1994), and M. Milson (1998), R. A. M. Mneimneh, ed. (2004); bibliography by the Bibliographic and Computer Center, Cairo (2003). Leading Arab Novelist Gave Streets a Voice Leading Arab Novelist Gave Streets a Voice TOOLBOX Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, August 31, 2006 Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian novelist who was the first Arabic writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature and who was often considered the greatest writer in the Arab world, died yesterday at Police Hospital in Cairo at age 94. He had pneumonia and kidney ailments and had suffered a head injury in a fall at his home in July. Mahfouz lived his entire life in Cairo, which provided the inspiration and backdrop for almost all of his writing.

In spite of his productivity -- he wrote more than 50 books, including plays, short stories, essays and 34 novels -- he was little known outside the Arab world when he was awarded the Nobel in 1988. Since then, his works have been widely published in translation, and his writing and public views made him both beloved and reviled in his homeland. He was seen as a voice of moderation, denouncing both Islamic fundamentalism and recent American incursions in the Middle East. He supported the 1979 peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, and in 1989 he condemned the Islamic fatwa death sentence pronounced on Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie. Mahfouz declared Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini guilty of terrorism, saying his action violated human rights and was "also against Islam because it harms the reputation of Islam and Moslems in the civilized world." Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak described Mahfouz yesterday as "a cultural light who brought Arab literature to the world.

He expressed the values of enlightenment and tolerance that reject extremism." Mahfouz found himself a victim of extremism on several occasions, most forcibly in October 1994, when an Islamic militant stabbed him in the neck outside his Cairo home. Fortunately for Mahfouz, he lived across the street from a hospital, where doctors saved his life. Within days, Egyptian police gunned down one assailant and arrested a cabal of other plotters. Three months after the attack, 13 Muslim radicals were convicted, and two were sentenced to death. The ringleader was Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is now serving a life sentence in federal prison in the United States for orchestrating terrorist bomb plots in New York. The knife attack severed nerves in Mahfouz's right arm, making him unable to hold a pen. (He had always written longhand.) With physical therapy, he regained the ability to use his hand and returned to writing. His final collection of stories, "The Seventh Heaven," was published in December. Frail, diabetic and nearly deaf, with thick glasses and an ever-present cigarette, Mahfouz was hardly an imposing figure.

Yet through sheer longevity -- he was born when Egypt was under the colonial control of Britain -- and the power of his storytelling, he became something of a forward-looking conscience of the Arab world. His implicit criticisms of Egypt's political and religious leaders were evident in his writing, but his greatest achievement lay in bringing a rarely seen world to life. With his early study of English, French and Russian fiction, he introduced the novel and short story to Arabic letters and brought a newfound sense of realism, particularly in his masterpiece, the three-volume "Cairo Trilogy," which was published in the 1950s. He set most of his works in the ancient Islamic quarter of Cairo, with its mosques and serpentine alleys teeming with shopkeepers, metalsmiths, government workers, peasants, prostitutes and thieves. His vibrant novels portraying life at every level of society were often likened to those of such other writers of urban social realism as Charles Dickens, Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola.

In "Palace of Desire," the second volume of the "Cairo Trilogy," he vividly depicted life in the alleyways: "Voices were blended and intermingled in a tumultuous swirl around which eddied laughter, shouts, the squeaking of doors and windows, piano and accordion music, rollicking handclaps, a policeman's bark, braying, grunts, coughs of hashish addicts and screams of drunkards, anonymous calls for help, raps of a stick, and singing by individuals and groups." English novelist John Fowles wrote that Mahfouz's fiction allowed readers the "rare privilege of entering a national psychology, in a way that thousands of journalistic articles or television documentaries could not achieve." Naguib Abdel Aziz al-Sabilgi Mahfouz was born Dec. 11, 1911, the youngest of seven children of a civil servant. He spent his early years in Cairo's centuries-old Gamaliya section before moving with his family to a suburb. He planned to study medicine at the University of Cairo -- where courses were taught in English and French -- but switched to philosophy and literature, graduating in 1934.

Besides several Arabic-language writers, his literary influences included Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner and Shaw. Beginning in the late 1930s, Mahfouz held a succession of jobs with the Egyptian government, culminating in an appointment as director of the national film agency in the 1960s. All the while, he maintained a diligent writing schedule. He published several historical novels before developing his realist style in the 1940s. In 1946, he began to write his 1,500-page "Cairo Trilogy"-- whose three parts are "Palace Walk," "Palace of Desire" and "Sugar Street" -- describing the fortunes of modern Egypt through the experiences of a Cairo family not unlike Mahfouz's own. After several years of silence, he returned in 1959 with "The Children of Gebelawi," a religious allegory that some conservative Muslims considered blasphemous. Crowds marched in the streets in protest, and the Al-Ahram newspaper had to get the personal permission of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to publish the work in serial form.

It did not appear in Egypt as a book until this year. In the United States, it was published as "The Children of the Alley." Later in his career, Mahfouz adopted experimental techniques, but his tales were often seen as anguished visions of Egypt's decaying social order. His 1985 novel "The Day the Leader Was Killed" was about the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Near the end of his life, Mahfouz could hold a pen for only 30 minutes at a time. As a result, he wrote a series of vignettes that were included in his final book. Each morning, Mahfouz walked through the streets of Cairo, arriving at the Aly Baba cafe at 7 a.m. to read the day's newspapers. On Fridays, he convened a salon of intellectuals at a restaurant. Except for summers at the Egyptian resort of Alexandria, he seldom left Cairo. When he was awarded the Nobel, he sent his two daughters to Stockholm to accept the prize. They survive him, along with his wife, Attiyatullah.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company Naguib Mahfouz - Telegraph Naguib Mahfouz 12:01AM BST 31 Aug 2006 Naguib Mahfouz, who died yesterday aged 94, was the first Arabic language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and is credited with transforming written Arabic into a vehicle for popular literature. Best known for the three books which comprise his Cairo Trilogy, published in the 1950s, Mahfouz became enormously popular all over the Arab world; but it was only after winning the Nobel Prize in 1988 that he became famous in the West. Late in life he aroused the wrath of Islamic militants, and was fortunate to survive an assassination attempt in 1994. Naguib Mahfouz was born on December 11 1911, the youngest of seven children of a minor civil servant, and grew up in the Gamaliyya quarter of Old Cairo. His childhood was coloured by the period of intense nationalist activity that led to the 1919 revolution, and he witnessed British troops firing on independence demonstrators outside his own home.

In 1930 he enrolled as a philosophy student at the newly-established University of Cairo, and soon afterwards published his first article, which focused on the inevitable triumph of Socialism. He continued to publish theoretical articles and, since all lectures were conducted in English and French, set about improving his knowledge of these languages with his customary self-discipline. He soon completed an Arabic translation of James Baikies's Ancient Egypt, which was published in 1932; and, by the time he graduated, he could read Zola and Balzac in the original — though he particularly enjoyed Tolstoy, which he read in French. He never managed to finish a novel by Dickens. Related Articles Faten Hamama 18 Jan 2015 After graduating he decided both to enter the comfortable world of the civil service and to become a writer. He had soon completed 80 short stories, most of them in the cynical but witty style of Guy de Maupassant, and his first collection, A Whisper of Madness, was published in 1938. The next year he went to work for the Ministry of Religious Affairs, where he remained for the next 15 years.

After three unsuccessful attempts his first novel, Games of Fate, was published in 1939. Heavily influenced by Walter Scott, it was a historical, romantic novel set in Ancient Egypt and featured an oppressive monarchy and the expulsion of foreign invaders. He had originally planned to write a series of similar novels, but the Second World War broke out and his outlook changed. New Cairo (1946) was the first of five novels set in contemporary Cairo. Written in a social-realist style most reminiscent of Balzac, this story of corruption at the University was soon followed by Khan al-Khalili (1945) and Midaq Alley (1947), a vivid evocation of the way in which the Second World War affected the inhabitants of the neighbourhood where Mahfouz was born. The characters, who included a beautiful prostitute, a dope-addicted paedophile and a "cripple-maker", were both fascinating and shocking for Egyptian readers — the mere thought of writing about such subjects had hitherto been taboo, and yet Mahfouz handled them with a candour unknown in Arabic literature.

The Mirage (1949) and The Beginning and the End (1951) were characterised by a strong sense of family, concern for the underprivileged and more social realism. By this time Mahfouz was also working with a film director called Abou Seif on a series of hugely popular and highly successful screenplays that captured the flavour of contemporary Egyptian life. In 1947 he began his most ambitious work, the Cairo Trilogy, which he described as "a history of my country and myself". It was the eventual French translation of volume one in 1988 which is generally thought to have brought him the Nobel Prize, since none of the committee members could read Arabic. Palace Walk (1956) introduces the petty bourgeois family that he follows through three generations, from 1917 to 1944. It concentrates on the patriarch whose power fades away along with his traditional society. Palace of Desire (1957) focuses on his oldest son, whose dissolute lifestyle matches the corruption and failure of the nationalist movement; while Kamal, the youngest son, who is a self-portrait of the author, undergoes a similar crisis of faith.

Sugar Street (1957) tells the story of the patriarch's grandchildren and shows a renewed hope in the modern world. The 1,500-page trilogy has become the best known piece of fiction in Arabic, and its use of the vernacular, its psychological detail and its sheer social scope were revolutionary. Such a book had never been seen in Arabic before and it was a huge and immediate success. By 1985 it had been reprinted 13 times, while a pirate Lebanese version had sold more than a million copies; Palace of Desire had won him the State Prize for Literature. After the 1952 revolution (which ended the monarchy and put Nasser into power) Mahfouz felt that the world he had chosen to chronicle had begun to disappear. For a time he worked on a number of screenplays. He also married, had two daughters and finally transferred to a post in the Ministry of Arts. By 1959, when he eventually resumed fiction writing, his style had changed again.

Children of Gebelawi (1959, translated 1981) is an iconoclastic allegory containing 114 chapters (the same number as the Koran) which concludes with a vision of man searching in a rubbish dump for clues about his salvation. It was serialised in Al-Ahram, Egypt's biggest-circulation national newspaper, but was at once condemned as blasphemous and was not published in Egypt. Late last year a monthly magazine tried to publish the novel, but Mahfouz said that he would not agree without the consent of Al-Azhar university, Sunni Islam's oldest seat of learning. From 1960 onwards more than 30 of Mahfouz's novels and short stories were adapted for the screen, starting with The Beginning and the End, which won the National Film Prize in 1962, and his work began to be revered by cinema-going Egyptians who had never read his books. Between 1961 and 1967 he published six novel and short-story collections, all experimental and often anguished, reflecting his growing interest in European modernism and the works of Jean-Paul Sartre.

The Thief and the Dogs (1961) concerned a victim driven mad by the desire for revenge, while Autumn Quail (1961) tackled the Nasser government's failure to rehabilitate the intellectuals of the old regime. Egypt's humiliation in the Six-Day War threw him into a new spiritual crisis which reached a peak with Miramar (1967), a bleak tale in which the lone figure of hope in a corrupt world is a peasant girl living in squalor in Alexandria. For several years after this he wrote only short stories and Absurd plays in which nameless characters pursue undefined quests with tragic results. After his retirement from the civil service in 1972 he completed the best received of his later novels, Wedding Song (1987), the story of the supposed suicide of a playwright after rumours that he has murdered his wife and child. During the late 1970s Mahfouz's work was attacked because of his support for the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty. But the public continued to read his books, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1988 was universally welcomed.

He himself received the news with typical understatement: "I was not even aware that I had been nominated… I thought the world had forgotten us." After the award ceremony, his rather retiring life briefly became a whirlwind of chat-shows and public appearances but, though he was now a national symbol, none of this dented his modesty. Typically, he gave more than half the £250,000 prize money to his family and a large proportion of the remainder to a Palestinian charity. In December 1988 Children of Gebelawi was once again serialised in Al-Ahram, and publication set off a renewed barrage of abuse as well as a death sentence from one of Egypt's leading imams. Although Mahfouz was recognised everywhere (his portrait now adorned Egypt's postage stamps), he refused offers of government protection. His acceptance of the Nobel prize from the "godless" West, his condemnation of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and his defence of Salman Rushdie all exacerbated his situation and, in October 1994, he was the victim of a street attack near his home, during which he was stabbed twice in the neck. His writing hand was paralysed.

Two Islamic militants were later hanged for attempted murder. By this time Mahfouz's obscurity in the West had lifted, and the rights to the Cairo Trilogy were finally sold in the United States, having been on the market there for 20 years. Renowned for his simplicity as well as his self-discipline, even after he found fame Mahfouz continued to live in a modest Cairo flat with his wife, Attiyat-Allah, and his two daughters. He suffered from chronic health problems, but he still lived up to his nick-name "Omega", a reference to the unvarying tick-tock of his schedule. Every morning he rose at 6am, went for a 60-minute walk through Cairo to the Ali Baba café, read through the morning's newspapers and then returned home to write for two hours. Every afternoon except Thursday he received visitors from all over the world at his office at Al-Ahram, for which he wrote a column. Apart from two government-sponsored visits to Yemen and Yugoslavia and a trip to London in 1991 for an operation, he never set foot outside Egypt.

On his eighty-fifth birthday, in December 1996, the American University in Cairo inaugurated a literary prize in his name, while the Cairo Film Festival gave out a Naguib Mahfouz award. He also published a collection of aphorisms, parables and musings entitled Echoes of an Autobiography. Last year he published The Seventh Heaven, a collection of stories about the afterlife.

Question: Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz was the first Arabic language writer to win which Nobel Prize?
Answer: Literature