Born in Cairo in 1911 and first published in 1939, Naguib Mahfouz is now regarded as the most well known and most studied Arab novelist in the English-speaking world. Since 1939 he has written nearly forty novels and fourteen collections of short stories as well as screenplays and stage plays and his work has been translated into many languages and adapted for the cinema, television and stage.

His style has undergone a number of changes over the course of his career; his early novels drew on the history of Egypt and were followed by more realistic/modern works. In the late sixties his writing varied from the surrealist and abstract to social commentary. For some time now he has employed more traditional Arabic narrative techniques, opening up possibilities for a distinct Arab form of the novel.

In 1988 Mahfouz was the first Arab writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

• http://www.sis.gov.eg/egyptinf/culture/html/nmahfouz.htm
• http://almaz.com/nobel/literature/1988a.html
• http://users.ox.ac.uk/~orie0704/mahfouz/
• http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mahfouz.htm
• http://www.al-bab.com/arab/literature/mahfouz.htm
• http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/mahfz.htm