Abdul Rahman Munif

Born in Amman to a Saudi father and an Iraqi mother, trained as a petroleum economist in Belgrade, stripped of his Saudi citizenship for political activity, Munif spent his writing life moving between Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, and Paris. He came to fiction late, in his forties, and produced — over the next three decades — one of the largest and most politically uncompromising bodies of work in modern Arabic literature.

The five-novel Mudun al-Milh (Cities of Salt) cycle, published between 1984 and 1989, is the unrivalled novelistic account of the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula and of what the discovery did to the bedouin societies on top of it. Banned in Saudi Arabia and several Gulf states, the cycle has been described by John Updike — who didn't much like it — as "the only serious work of fiction by a contemporary Arab to have given Western readers a sense of the experience of being inside an Islamic society."