Alaa Al Aswany

A practising dentist in downtown Cairo, Al Aswany worked on his fiction in the long evenings between patients. His 2002 novel Imarat Yaqubyan (The Yacoubian Building) used a single Belle-Époque apartment block on Talaat Harb Street as a vertical cross-section of contemporary Egypt — from the rooftop slum tenants to the corrupt parliamentarian on the lower floors — and tackled topics that mainstream Arabic fiction had largely avoided: police torture, homosexuality, the marriage of Islamism and consumer capitalism.

The novel sold spectacularly across the Arab world, was filmed by Marwan Hamid in 2006 in the most expensive Egyptian production to that date, and made Al Aswany the most-translated living Arab novelist after Mahfouz. His follow-up Chicago (2007) and the Tahrir-era The Automobile Club of Egypt (2013) confirmed his interest in the panoramic social novel.

Al Aswany was an early and visible figure in the Kefaya movement and in the 2011 Tahrir uprising; his weekly newspaper column was, for several years, the most widely-read political commentary in Egypt. After 2013 he came under increasing pressure from the Egyptian state, was investigated for "insulting the president and judiciary", and now lives between Cairo and the United States. His most recent novel, The Republic of False Truths (2018), narrates the revolution and counter-revolution from inside.