Essays on Literature and Philosophy
The first writer in Arabic to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Naguib Mahfouz’s novels helped bring Arabic literature to an international readership. This collection of his early writing, from his time as a student of philosophy, reveals the intellectual ferment of the young author, grappling with two millennia of philosophers and writers and establishing his own voice among them.
Available in English for the first time, these essays tackle a vast array of subjects, from Presocratic Philosophy to love and the sexual impulse. The intellectual development demonstrated here forms the foundation of Mahfouz’s literary work, granting insight into the mind behind such famed work as the Cairo Trilogy, and Children of The Alley.
Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) was the greatest Arab writer of the twentieth century. Born in the old Islamic Quarter of Cairo in 1911, he began writing when he was seventeen before entering university to study as a student of philosophy in 1930. He is the author of over thirty novels – including a number of masterpieces, such as The Cairo Trilogy and Children of the Alley. In 1988 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Rasheed El-Enany is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, as well as Professor Emeritus of Modern Arabic Literature, University of Exeter. He has authored several books on Naguib Mahfouz, including Naguib Mahfouz. His Life and Times.
Aran Byrne is an Arabic language graduate of SOAS (University of London) and Oxford University. He was co-translator of Democracy Is the Answer by the best-selling Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany.