Edwar al-Charrat was born in 1926 in Alexandria , Egypt. During his Law studies, which he completed in 1946, he worked in a British marine depot and immediately after that at the Egyptian National Bank. Because of his participation in the activities of the anti-colonial movement, he
Dibou was born in Paris in 1950 and worked in marketing for many years. She regularly travelled to Egypt during the 1990s, and was so fascinated by the land and its culture that she finally left Paris to settle there in 2000. Together with her husband, the comic artist Golo,
Chalid al-Chamissi was born in 1962 in Cairo, Egypt. He studies politics in Cairo and Paris, worked for numerous Egyptian newspapers and made a name for himself in particular as a critical observer of social circumstances. He writes for the newspaper »Al-Shorouk« and, from February to October 2011 he had
Basma Abdel Aziz, born in 1976 in Cairo, is an award-winning writer, sculptor and psychiatrist who specializes in treating victims of torture. A much-celebrated novelist and a long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is a human rights defender who earned the nickname »the rebel« early on. She
Bahaa Taher was born in 1935 in Giza. He studied history and literature among other subjects at the University of Cairo. He then worked as a culture editor and reporter for Egyptian Radio. In the mid-sixties he published his first prose. Barred by censorship from writing in 1975, he emigrated
The American writer and literary scholar André Aciman was born in 1951 in Alexandria, Egypt. He comes from a family of Sephardic Jews of Italian descent and grew up in a multilingual environment in which French was the dominant language. Although his family was spared the expulsions from Egypt in
Alaa al-Aswani was born in Cairo in 1957. He attended the French secondary school in Cairo and studied dentistry at the university there and later at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is still practising this profession. In 1990 he published his first collection of short stories. In addition, he
