Middle Eastern, Turkish, and British Voices

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), an Egyptian novelist from Cairo, remains, as of this writing, the only writer in the Arabic language to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1988 "who, through works rich in nuance — now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous — has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind." His best-known work, the Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street, published 1956-1957), traces three generations of a Cairo merchant family across the first half of the twentieth century, chronicling Egypt's transformation under British occupation and its struggle toward independence. In 1994, Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck outside his Cairo home by an Islamist extremist, an attack widely linked to the controversy surrounding his 1959 novel Children of Gebelawi and to his public support for Salman Rushdie during the Satanic Verses affair; he survived but suffered lasting nerve damage to his writing hand.