Alaa Al Aswany

Alaa Al Aswany is an Egyptian novelist and dentist, born in Cairo on 26 May 1957. ¹ His novel The Yacoubian Building (2002), translated into more than thirty languages and filmed in 2006, made him one of the most widely read Arab authors of his generation; a founding member of the Kefaya movement and a prominent voice of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, he has lived in exile in Paris and New York since the Egyptian state sued him in 2019. ¹

Al Aswany was born in Cairo, the son of Abbas Al Aswany, a lawyer and writer from Aswan known for his "Aswaniyat" column in Rose al-Yusuf, who died when Alaa was nineteen. ¹ He attended the Lycée Français in Cairo and took a bachelor's degree in dentistry from Cairo University in 1980 and a master's degree in dentistry from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1985; he practised dentistry in Cairo alongside his writing for many years. ¹ He was a founding member of the opposition Kefaya movement and a well-known newspaper columnist, and during the 2011 revolution he was present in Tahrir Square throughout the protests; his televised confrontation with interim prime minister Ahmed Shafik is credited with contributing to Shafik's resignation. ¹ In 2019 the Egyptian government sued him for insulting the president, the military and state institutions, and he has since lived in exile in Paris and New York. ¹ His advocacy of a secular state and his criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood are political positions, recorded here as such; the museum records no religion for him, for the reasons set out in his data record. ¹

The Yacoubian Building (2002) portrays the residents of a once-grand Cairo apartment building and was translated into thirty-seven languages; its 2006 film adaptation was the most expensive Egyptian production of its time. ¹ It was followed by Chicago (2007), set among Egyptian immigrants at an American university; the novella and story collection Friendly Fire; The Automobile Club of Egypt (2013); The Republic of False Truths (2018; English translation 2021), about the 2011 revolution; and The Trees Walk in Alexandria (2024). ¹ He was named among Foreign Policy magazine's Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2011 and made a chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2016. ¹

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