各国名人英文介绍-Naguib Mahfouz（在线收听）

Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 and died in 2006. He was an Egyptian novelist and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is considered as the father of modern Arabic literature and is popular throughout the Arab world. Many of his books were about Egyptian nationalism. He said politics “is the very axis of our thinking”.

Mahfouz came from a lower middle-class Muslim family in Cairo, the youngest of seven children. He had a very strict Islamic upbringing. He later wondered how “an artist would emerge from that family". Mahfouz was an avid reader and spent his early years with his head buried in books. His interests included traditional Arab literature and Western classics and detective stories.

He graduated in philosophy from the University of Cairo and decided to be a professional writer. He got a job in the Ministry of Culture, where he stayed until 1972, as a movie censor. While working as a civil servant, Mahfouz wrote 34 novels, 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts and five plays. Many of his works were made into Arabic-language movies.

Mahfouz was not a stranger to controversy. Many Arab countries banned his books because of his support of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. He also supported Salman Rushdie after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the author to death. Mahfouz received many death threats, and he survived an assassination attempt in 1994. He is the only Arabic-language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.