Naguib Mahfouz

Wen-chin Ouyang (SOAS, University of London)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 8.1.1: North African Writing and Culture: Arabic, Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (University of Western Australia), Lia Brozgal (University of California, Los Angeles), Helen Rachel Cousins (Birmingham Newman University), Ziad Elmarsafy (King's College London), Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Siobhán McIlvanney (King's College London), Dalia Mostafa (University of Manchester), Nora Parr (SOAS, University of London), Rita Sakr (Maynooth University)

Dates

Born 11 Dec 1911
Died 30 Aug 2006
Activity 1932-2006

Places

Born in Egypt
Active in Egypt

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Mahfouz's Works

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Naguib Mahfouz (December 11, 1911-August 30, 2006) is to date the only Arab writer to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1988). His global reach is magnified by the very fact that he rarely travelled outside Egypt - he did not even appear at his own Nobel Award Ceremony. He seemed to have confined himself physically, emotionally and literarily to Cairo, where he was born into a lower middle-class Muslim family and lived all his life. Al-Jamaliyya, the quarter of his birth in old Cairo, and al-‘Abbasiyya, the suburb in new Cairo to which his family moved in 1924, would remain at the heart of practically all his writings. This exclusive devotion to Cairo cannot hide the cosmopolitan outlook underpinning his works. For the city that shaped his thought and literary career was…

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2756 words

Citation: Ouyang, Wen-chin. "Naguib Mahfouz". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 May 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12076, accessed 31 October 2024.]