Egyptian author Nadia Kamel was born in 1961 in Cairo, where she works as a filmmaker, writer, and producer. The daughter of journalist parents with a long history of political activism, Kamel...

Ahmed Fouad Negm (1929–2013) was one of Egypt’s most popular poets. The first poet to write in colloquial Egyptian, he was known for his satiric verses mocking rulers and others in...

Born in 1938 in the municipality of Dayrut in the impoverished southern Egyptian governorate of Assiut, Muhammed Mustajab completed high school and became a laborer, working on the construction of...

Ezzedine Fishere is an Egyptian writer. Since his debut in 1995, he published seven novels, in Arabic, all of them received acclaim by critics and the wide public. His latest novel, Kol Haza...

Mohammed Abdelnabi is an Egyptian writer born in 1977. He obtained a BA in languages and translation from the English and Simultaneous Translation Department of Al-Azhar University and...

Nariman Youssef is a Cairo-born, London-based translator and researcher. She holds a master’s degree in translation studies from the University of Edinburgh and works between...

Basma Abdel Aziz is a psychiatrist, writer, and sculptor. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is the author of several works of nonfiction. In 2016 she was...

Donia Maher is an Egyptian artist and writer. In 2010, she received a production award from al-Mawred al-Thaqafy (Culture Resource) for The Apartment in Bab el-Louk. She lives in...

Abdel-Moneim Ramadan was born in 1951 in Cairo, Egypt. He published the first of his eight collections of poetry in 1980, and is also the author of an autobiography and a collection of essays....

Nawal El Saadawi is a world-renowned writer. She is a novelist, a psychiatrist, and the author of more than forty books of fiction and nonfiction. She writes in Arabic and lives in Egypt. Her...

Miral al-Tahawy was born in Sharqiya in the Egyptian Delta into a Bedouin family of the al-Hanadi tribe. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature and...

"The Voltaire of the Nile," Albert Cossery (1913–2008) was born in Cairo. At the age of seventeen he moved to Paris, where he would live for the rest of his life. Some of his...

Yusuf al-Shirbini wrote his primary work, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded [Hazz al-Quhuf bi-Sharh Qasid Abi Shaduf ], in or shortly after 1686. His only other known work is...

Gamal al-Ghitani was born in 1945 and educated in Cairo. He published thirteen novels and six collections of short stories and was editor in chief of the literary review Akhbar al-adab. He died in...

Lenin El-Ramly was born in 1945. He is not only a playwright, but a writer for television and film, a producer of theater and film, and a company manager. His expressionism and his penchant for...

Haggag Hassan Oddoul (born Alexandria, Egypt, 1944) an ethnic Nubian author--who writes in Arabic--did construction work on the Aswan High Dam and has served in the Egyptian armed forces during...

Na'am al-Baz is an Egyptian journalist who has written for Al-Akhbar newspaper.

Tamer Fathy's debut collection of poetry, Yesterday I Lost A Button, was published in 2005. All of the poems in the book revolved around clothes-their personalities, their memories, and...

Mahmoud El-Wardani (born Cairo, 1950) has published six novels and several collections of short stories. Typically his works are dispassionate and discontinuous depictions of ambiguous,...

Salwa Bakr is the author of a number of books in Arabic. One of her novels (The Golden Chariot) and two short story collections (The Wiles of Men and Such A Beautiful Voice) have been published...

As a young doctor studying in Kiev in 1986, Mohamed Makhzangi found himself in the midst of a public health catastrophe when the Chernobyl nuclear plant melted down that spring. Through an array...

Samah Selim is the translator of Memories of a Meltdown: An Egyptian between Moscow and Chernobyl by Mohamed Makhzangi (AUC Press, 2006), Neighborhood and Boulevard: Reading Through the Modern...

Iman Mersal was born in 1966 in a small village in the Delta. A graduate of Mansura University, she was co-editor from 1985 to 1988 of the independent feminist magazine Bint al-Ard (Daughter of...

Hamdy Abu Golayyel was born in 1968. He is of Bedouin origin and he moved to Cairo from a settlement like the one he describes in his novel Thieves in Retirement (2006). He is editorial director...

Sayed Ragab lives in Cairo, where he is a well-known and critically acclaimed actor and storyteller in the independent theater scene. He began writing his own stories in 1998, one of which,...

André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir, False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory, and Call Me By Your Name, a novel. He is also the co-author and editor of The Proust...

One of Egypt's leading writers, Radwa 'Ashur has published a number of novels and collections of short stories in Arabic. She is perhaps best known for her Granada Trilogy (Thulathiyyat...