The Netherlands-Flemish Institute (NVIC) in Cairo will host Thursday, 11 April, at 7:00pm, writer and journalist Mohamed Shoair and novelist and translator Ahmed Shafei to discuss Shoair's latest book, “Sons of Gebelawi: Biography of the Forbidden Novel,” in additon to the Naguib Mahfouz archives, which Shoair spent the last couple of years researching.
In the book, released last year, Shoair chronicles the events that preceded the publishing of Mahfouz's most controversial novel, Sons of Geblawi, serialised in Al-Ahram newspaper in 1959, looking at how it was banned and its critical reception.
Shoair embarked on a multi-year mission of combing through thousands of books, magazines and newspapers drawn from the last 50 years to write his book.
A by-product was finding Mahfouz’s unpublished short stories in his archival papers.
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