Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. His nearly forty novels and hundreds of short stories range from re-imaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. In 1988, he was the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in August 2006.
Nariman Khales Naili al-Warraki (1932–2016) was senior Arabic language instructor and former director of the Arabic Language Unit of the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo.