Najib Mahfuz (born 1912) was Egypt's foremost novelist and the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize in literature. He had wide influence in the Arab world and was the author from that area best known to the West in the latter half of the 20th century.

Najib Mahfuz was born in the popular quarter Hayy Al-Jamaliyya in Cairo, Egypt, on December 12, 1912, to a middle-class merchant family. During his high school years he began to read the Arabic classics as well as the Western ones that he could find in translation. He proceeded to major in philosophy at Cairo University, and after graduating in 1934 he worked his way up the bureaucracy as a civil servant. He continued to work until he retired as director of the Cinema Organization, after which he worked as a consultant to several governmental cultural organizations. He was a frequent contributor to the daily newspaper...