The Egyptian Nobel literature laureate in conversation with his friends

Gamal al-Ghitani (1945-2015) was an Egyptian novelist, literary editor, political commentator, and public intellectual. He published over a dozen novels, including Zayni Barakat (AUC Press, 2004) and The Zafarani Files (AUC Press, 2009), as well as several collections of short stories. He was also founding editor of the literary magazine, Akhbar al-adab (1993-2011). He was awarded the Egyptian State Prize for the Novel (1980), the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France (1987), and the Egyptian State Prize for Literature (2007). In 2015, he received the Nile Award in Literature, Egypt's highest literary honor.
Humphrey Davies has translated some thirty book-length works from Arabic, including The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany, and is a two-time winner of the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. He took his degrees from Cambridge University and the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Cairo.