To mark 20 years since the passing of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), the 57th Cairo International Book Fair (21 January-3 February) has made him Personality of the Year. But the fair organisers are not the only ones to think of capitalising on the great novelist’s legacy. His current Arabic publishers, Diwan — who have exclusive world rights to Mahfouz’s work in Arabic — have had big plans for him too.
According to publisher and writer Ahmed Al-Qarmalawi, co-founder and CEO, “The rights had been with Al-Sherouk for a specific period of time, it was to end in April 2022, and Mahfouz’s family wanted to sign a new deal with another publisher, whatever their reasons. But it had to be an Egyptian publisher which they insisted on even though they received offers from Arab publishers no Egyptian publisher could compete with. Someone connected us with Mahfouz’s daughter Um Kulthoum, and when we met and talked, we found there was a harmony in vision. His daughter knew exactly what she wanted, and she was realistic about the amount of money she asked for.
“Once the agreement was concluded, we had five months to get the rights legally, so we started working on the content all at once. We started collecting the text from different sources, gathering all previous editions of the books and comparing them in order to reach the most accurate version; and that took a long time, because we also found the magazines in which some novels first appeared, serialised, and the Golden Book series, edited by Youssef Al-Sebaei, which also published some of Mahfouz’s early work. This, in addition to the Misr Bookshop, Al-Sherouk and Lebanese Book editions, as well as the early edition of Awlad Haretna (Children of the Alley).”
Already, as they did this work, the Diwan team was busy coming up with a visual identity for their Mahfouz project. “There was an important question that imposed itself from the beginning,” Qarmalawi says: “who is the visual artist whom we want for this project? My team and I agreed that we want a young artist to present Naguib Mahfouz to the younger generation they belong to. We are targeting the younger generation and not traditional readers of Mahfouz who already know who he is and what, as it were, he looks like. Our goal was for this young artist to extend a hand to the younger generations and who will be reading Mahfouz with the eye of the present and these young generations and at that same time. Meanwhile our partner Amal Mahmoud had introduced us to a beautiful art book by a young Egyptian, Yousef Sabry, published abroad, and we met him when he brought copies of the book to be displayed at Diwan bookstores. Initially we didn’t think of Yousef Sabry for the Mahfouz project, but after a while something clicked, and since he was still based in Europe we had a Zoom meeting with him to sound him out.”
Sabry himself, born in 1997, was shocked to be approached with such a task. “Of course I knew who Naguib Mahfouz was, but I’d never read anything by him, and I asked them why they chose me for this project. Their answer was that it was because I didn’t belong to that world of Mahfouz readers and didn’t see Mahfouz with the eye of the past. My response was that I needed some time to think about it and do some research. Within a week, though, I was ready for the project. I felt humbled to be part of such a project, such a huge responsibility. The scale and the detail of it was overwhelming, and I went about figuring out exactly what was needed before coming up with the concept.”
“Since the rights to Mahfouz’s work are still being sold,” Qarmalawi says, “then he is a timeless writer, and that project requires special attention. Sabry offered to be the creative director of the whole project and gather a number of artists to participate with paintings and designs appropriate to each collection of books within the Mahfouz corpus: for the Islamic Cairo books, for example, an artist whose work is in that style; and so on. The challenge was to keep the whole collection harmonious with a unified look despite the inclusion of various artists and styles. Sabry also suggested that we should use a branding studio to create the overall style. We settled on 40MUSTAQEL, and they set up a frame within which all the different styles could be accommodated. So, for example, Mahfouz’s name would always be printed in the calligraphic Mameluki thuluth typeface, which typifies his birthplace of Al-Gamaleya in Islamic Cairo. They asked Sabry to provide a motif for the page layout, too. Some elements were left open so that they could change from one set of books to another.
Regarding the social media campaign waged against the new covers, Al-Qarmalawi says, “Naguib Mahfouz is a great influence who shaped Egyptian consciousness, and so people feel possessive towards him and how they see his world; they might feel that a young artist like Youssef Sabry is not capable of illustrating the world of Mahfouz, being familiar with that world as it appears in the work of Gamal Kotb, who made the Misr Bookshop covers, for example. But we had the opposite viewpoint: that Naguib Mahfouz is one thing and illustrations of his work – whether by Kotb or by Helmy Al-Touni, who prodeced something completely different for Al-Sherouk – another.
“Anyway, this was the basis of the project, but Sabry went on to develop a broader concept, thinking about the economic dimension and social impact of the project—how to spread the Mahfouz virus, as it were, so that more and more people could be drawn in. We created merchandise alongside the books: bookmarks, tote bags, notebooks, posters...” Qarmalawi also mentions an annual Mahfouz festival with various activities before moving onto perhaps the most fascinating move Diwan has made: “The idea we’re still developing is to create comic books and graphic novels out of Mahfouz’s works; Sabry feels that even the short stories could be used in zines. We had an idea to turn Alwad Haretna (Children of the Alley) into a graphic novel, which was something the artist Migo,” the founder of YA Comix Studio, “had proposed a long time before.”
Diwan partnered with Al-Mahrousa, a publisher with experience in comics who had already worked with Migo: “We believe in collaboration, and I don’t believe there is competition in the field of publishing, because the first to do something takes the risk on behalf of all the others and once a precedent is set everyone feels more secure. We made a deal with Al-Mahrousa: we would be in charge of everything related to the content and provide the required harmony for the world of Naguib Mahfouz, and they would coordinate the artists for this kind of work. We concluded agreements for three books to be made into graphic novels: Al-Leis wal Kelab (The Thief and the Dogs), Miramar, and the first part of Awlad Haretna (Children of the Alley)...”
The first of these is already available, in simple language reminiscent of Mahfouz’s but with a style of drawing that is wholly contemporary. It has been produced in English translation as well as the Arabic original, with the translation made by a local writer, Mai Serhan, to ensure awareness of the cultural context and mastery of nuance. Diwan is in the process of marketing the graphic novels all over the world.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 29 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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