Egypt's ministry of culture is considering launching an international literary prize named after Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.
During his visit to Paris from 18 to 20 May, Culture Minister Abdel-Wahed El-Nabawy met with the director of the Med 21 institution Mohammed Azeezia and Egyptian writer Gamal El-Ghitany to discuss the details of such a prize.
El-Nabawy visited Paris to open the Cairo-Paris festival on 19 May.
Egypt’s acclaimed writer Naguib Mahfouz died aged 95 in 2006, leaving behind him a prolific literary legacy of 34 novels, about 350 short stories, several plays and 30 screenplays, a life’s work that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.
Mahfouz was the first author from the Arab world to be awarded the prize.
The writer is best known for his Cairo Trilogy, whose three novels – Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street – follow a Cairene family throughout the first half of the twentieth century, when Egypt was under British occupation.
Short link: