Naguib Mahfouz was one of the most prominent authors of Arabic fiction in the twentieth-century. He was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, he was influenced by many Western writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and, above all, Proust. He had more than thirty novels to his credit, ranging from his early historical romances to his later experimental novels. In 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mahfouz died in 2006.

Peter Theroux is the author of Sandstorms: Days and Nights in Arabia (1990) and Translating LA (1994). He is the translator of several major Arabic novels. He lives in suburban Los Angeles.