Midaq Alley

About the Author

The leading Arabic novelist, Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, he has been influenced by many Western writers, he says, including Flaubert, Zola, Camus, Dostoyevsky, and above all, Proust. Until his retirement in 1972, Mahfouz worked in various government ministries — but he was always writing. Today he has more than thirty novels to his credit, among them his masterwork _The Cairo Trilogy.__ He lives in the Cairo suburb of Agouza with his wife and two daughters.

[Mahfouz died in 2006.]