Alaa Al Aswany
Alaa el-Aswany is an Egyptian writer and a founding member of the political movement Kefaya. Trained as a dentist in Egypt and Chicago, el-Aswany's novels include The Yacoubian Building and Chicago.
Anna Metcalfe of the Financial Times put a few questions to the author, including:
Who are your literary heroes?Read the full Q & A.For me, Dostoyevsky is the best novelist in the history of literature.
* * *
Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?
Gabriel García Márquez.
* * *
What was the first novel you read?
The first in Arabic was by Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winner. In French it was a simplified Labrière called Les Caractères.
--Marshal Zeringue
