Naguib Mahfouz is the most famous Egyptian author.

A story of Naguib Mahfouz was born December 11, 1911 , in the old Gamaliya district of Cairo , the youngest of seven children in a family of five boys and two girls . Although he had many brothers and sisters, Mahfouz felt like an only child because the next younger brother was ten years older than him. He cried his lack of ties between brothers and sisters normal , which is reflected in the representation of fraternal relations in much of his work. But his childhood was happy a story , the family was stable and loving , with religion plays a very important role in their lives and there are many signs of affection for his childhood Mahfouz in his work a story.

He spent his first nine or ten years Gamaliya a story , which plays an important role in his earlier realist novels as Midaq Alley and The Cairo Trilogy , and figures symbolically in later books as children of the Alley and The Harafish . The driveway of his childhood is a microcosm of Egyptian society in his works. The home of the family, too, seems to have inspired Mahfouz and serves as a model for the family home Abd al - Jawad in The Cairo Trilogy . Mahfouz recalls various venues secrets in these novels, including the roof, which becomes a stage for family gatherings and amateur meetings a story.

The revolution of 1919 also had a lasting effect on Mahfouz a story , leaving him with his first real sense of nationalist sentiment and greatly influence his writing. Interestingly, he later became disillusioned with the Revolution of 1952, but he challenged practices , not its principles. He expressed his criticism clearly in some of his writings in the 1960s ( in the novels as Miramar ), but unlike many other intellectuals of the time has never been stopped by Nasser a story.

 A story Around 1920 , his family moved to Abbasiya , a new suburb , which is frequently referred to as Gamaliya in his novels and short stories. This, as Kamal in The Cairo Trilogy , Mahfouz has experienced love for the first time a story.

Mahfouz began writing  a story in elementary school when he was a fan of detective , historical, and adventure novels . In high school , he moved on innovative Arabic fiction Taha Hussein Mohammed Hussein Haykal , Ibrahim al - Mazini - who served as models for the story .

Despite his penchant for writing and its installation at the beginning with math and science, Mahfouz elected to study philosophy at Fuad I (now Cairo University ) in 1930 , graduated in 1934. His interest in philosophy was partly inspired by the writings of al Abbas - Aqqad . From high school and continuing through his college years, he has published more than forty articles in various magazines and newspapers , most of which dealt with philosophical and psychological issues and were strongly influenced by Henri Bergson a story .

From 1934 until his retirement in 1971 at the age of sixty , he worked in a variety of departments as a public servant . He served as a secretary at the University of Cairo until 1938 , when he moved to the Ministry of Religious Affairs to work as parliamentary secretary .

In 1945 , he requested the transfer of the Ghuri library near his birthplace Gamaliya , where he managed the project asset loan , a program of interest-free loans to the poor a story. It was a very happy time for him, he had plenty of opportunity to observe life in the region and to read Western literature , including her favorites: Shakespeare, Conrad, Melville, Flaubert , Stendhal, Tolstoy , Proust, O'Neill, Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg and . Since the 1950s , he worked as secretary to the Minister of National Guidance , Director of the Office of Film Censorship , Director General of the film support , advise the General Organization the film industry , and finally as advisor to the Minister of Culture.

Mahfouz remained a bachelor until 1954 , when he married at the age of 43 years. He and his wife raised two daughters in their apartment in Agouza , a neighborhood of Cairo Nileside . He left Egypt three times in his life, once in Yemen , once for the former Yugoslavia , and once in England for surgery.

His first story, The Wisdom of Cheops , was published in 1939, and after he has written 35 novels and five collections of short stories , as well as echoes of an autobiography in 1994.

An attempt on his life in 1994, he was stabbed in the neck outside his home by a religious fanatic left him able to write with great difficulty for half an hour a day and therefore he wrote very short fictions on the basis of his dreams he called "Dreams of convalescence, " two selections were published in English translation as dreams and dreams out by AUC Press in 2004 and 2006 respectively.

Since the late 1940s to the early 1980s, he also worked on some twenty to five screenplays , an activity that seems to have influenced the use of devices such as editing and flashback in his prose writings . Over thirty Egyptian films were based on Mahfouz 's novels and short stories , but he was never interested in the adaptation of his own books to the screen adaptations were made by scenarios of other .

He was invited to be a skilled writer in Al-Ahram newspaper in 1971 and has continued to produce a weekly column that was published simultaneously in al -Ahram Arabic and English in Al- Ahram Weekly that shortly before his death. A collection of these columns was published to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2001, Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber : Reflections of a Nobel Laureate , 1994-2001 : From conversations with Mohamed Salmawy .

Mahfouz was awarded the Egyptian State Prize twice for his writings. In 1988, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature . The Swedish Academy of Letters , in its citation for the award, noted that Mahfouz " through works rich in nuance , now with realistic clarity , evocative ambiguous now formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind . "

In 1989, Mahfouz was awarded the Presidential Medal of the American University in Cairo, which also awarded him an honorary doctorate in June 1995. In 1992 he was elected an honorary member of the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters American , and in 2002 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Naguib Mahfouz died in Cairo August 30, 2006 at the age of 94 in the presence of his wife and his daughters, Umm Kalthoum and Atiya Faten.