by Yusuf Idris

Born in 1927 in Al-Bayrum, a village in Egypt’s Nile Delta, Yusuf Idris moved to Cairo in 1945 to study medicine. As a student he joined the nationalist movement against British occupation, his involvement more than once leading to his arrest and jailing on political charges. When he graduated in 1951, Idris took up an internship at Qasr al-Aini hospital in downtown Cairo, and later worked in one of the most impoverished and crowded areas of the city, al-Darb al-Ahmar. He opened a clinic and served as a medical inspector, his exposure to the poor helping him portray a wide range of human experience in his literary works. Idris gained renown as a journalist, novelist, playwright, and the premier short-story writer in Arabic, leaving medicine in 1967 to devote himself to writing and to the promotion of literature...