Essential Yusuf Idris
Product details
- ISBN 9789774162428
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jul 2009
- Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
- Publication City/Country: EG
- Product Form: Hardback
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A carefully curated collection of short story masterpieces from the "genius of the short story" (Tawfiq al-Hakim) and the Arab world's greatest short-story writer of the twentieth century
''Like the Russian aristocrats of Chekhov, the provincial bourgeoisie of Flaubert, or the Ibo villagers of Achebe, Idris raises his authentic characters into convincing types within their context: he makes us live their agonies and hopes.''—Ferial Ghazoul
Yusuf Idris (1927–91), who belonged to the same generation of pioneering Egyptian writers as Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim, is widely celebrated as the father of the Arabic short story. He studied and practiced medicine, but his interests were in politics and the support of the nationalist struggle, and in writing—and his writing, whether in his regular newspaper columns or in his fiction, often reflected his political convictions. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature more than once, and when the prize went to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, Idris felt that he had been passed over because of his outspoken views on Israel. In all, Yusuf Idris wrote some twelve collections of superbly crafted short stories, mainly about ordinary, poor people, many of which have been translated into English and are included, along with an extract from one of his novels, in this collection of the best of his work.
Yusuf Idris was one of the great figures of twentieth-century Arabic literature. Born in 1927 and trained as a doctor, his first collection of stories was published in 1956. In 1960 he gave up medicine to become editor of the Cairo daily newspaper al-Gumhuriya, and he continued to write and publish prolifically until his death in 1991. His novel City of Love and Ashes was published in English translation by the AUC Press in 1998.
Denys Johnson-Davies (1922–2017) was the translator of more than thirty volumes of translation of modern Arabic literature, including Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North and Yayha Hakki's The Lamp of Umm Hashim. He received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2007 for Personality of the Year in the Field of Culture.
