Sonallah Ibrahim

Imprisoned in 1959 with other young Egyptian Communists in Nasser's round-up of the left, Sonallah Ibrahim spent five and a half years in the Wahat (Oases) prison camp before being released in 1964. He emerged with a notebook of detached, factual prose sketches that became Tilka al-Ra'iha (That Smell, 1966) — a single, claustrophobic novella about a recently-released political prisoner readjusting to Cairo. Banned almost immediately for its frankness about sex and surveillance, the novella inaugurated a deliberately flat, anti-rhetorical Arabic prose that influenced almost every Egyptian novelist who came after.

Ibrahim's later novels make extensive use of newspaper clippings, government communiqués, and consumer ephemera. Al-Lajna (The Committee, 1981) is a Kafka-esque parable of an unnamed citizen interrogated by a faceless committee about Egyptian consumerism. Zaat (1992) interleaves chapters narrating a middle-class Cairo woman's life with chapters of pure newspaper headlines — the public history of Egypt running parallel to one woman's ordinary one.

In 2003 the state Supreme Council of Culture awarded him its top literary prize at a public ceremony in Cairo. Ibrahim took the stage, gave a speech denouncing the Mubarak government's corruption and complicity in Israeli policy, and refused the prize on television. The gesture became one of the most-quoted moments of Egyptian intellectual life of the decade. He has continued to write — Amrikanli (2003), al-Talasus (Stealth, 2007), and the late autobiographical novels — in the same dry, accumulative style that has been his signature for half a century.