Word: egyptian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...journalists who gathered in Stockholm's Stock Exchange building to learn the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature were once more caught off guard. Naguib who? The answer: Mahfouz, a 76-year-old Egyptian novelist, playwright and film writer. If the choice was predictably unpredictable, the selection procedure seemed familiar. The Swedish Academy again paddled out of the mainstream, this time heading up the Nile to honor the first Arabic writer in the 87-year history of the prize...
...realists as Dickens and Balzac. In nearly 40 novels and a dozen story collections, he has dealt with the social and political upheavals Egypt has experienced during his lifetime. His main contribution, says Sasson Somekh, a visiting professor of Arabic literature at Princeton, is the "creation of a new Egyptian style" that combines the narrative manner of classic texts such as The Thousand and One Nights with contemporary subject matter...
...page family saga that spans 27 years and both World Wars and is read as a microcosm of Cairene society. He supported Gamal Abdel Nasser's 1952 coup d'etat but gradually grew disillusioned with the colonel's policies. "It is true that the revolution liberated the Egyptian people and pushed them into modern life," says Mahfouz, "but it led to many wars that tired us out." Mahfouz found himself at the center of controversy in 1979 when he publicly backed Anwar Sadat's peace treaty with Israel. As a result, he was denounced by ; Islamic fundamentalists, and his works...
Mahfouz was one of the first literary figures to abandon the old classical style in Egyptian literature and write in a newly emerging style of combined romanticism and realism, Mahdi said, adding that Mahfouz was strongly influenced by the French novels of the 19th century. "He grew up reading Balzac," Mahdi said...
Mahfouz graduated from the University of Cairo. In the early 40's he joined the Egyptian Ministry of Culture where he worked until his retirement...