Yusuf Idris

Trained as a doctor and practising for years in the slums of Cairo, Idris brought to the Egyptian short story a clinician's eye for the exact texture of everyday lives — peasants, prostitutes, conscripts, junior bureaucrats, women trapped in arranged marriages — and a willingness to write in a colloquial Arabic register that horrified literary purists.

His debut collection Arkhas Layali (The Cheapest Nights, 1954) sold out in days and inaugurated a new social realism in Arabic prose. The title story — a poor villager wandering the streets at night, eventually returning home only because there is nothing else to do — has been anthologised in nearly every collection of modern Arabic short fiction since. He published a dozen further collections, several novels (Al-Haram, "The Sinners", 1959), and a number of plays (Al-Farafir, 1964) that tried to indigenise European absurdism.

Idris was a public intellectual on the Egyptian left, and his disappointment with what Nasserism had become darkened his fiction from the late 1960s onwards. The late stories are sparer, harsher, and more political than the early village tales. He was repeatedly tipped for the Nobel Prize and was, by some accounts, surprised and bitter when it went to Mahfouz in 1988 — the two men, despite a public friendship, represented different generational answers to the question of what Arabic prose should sound like.

He died in London in 1991 of complications from heart surgery, leaving behind one of the largest bodies of short fiction in modern Arabic and an enduring claim that the short story, not the novel, was the Egyptian form.