The renowned Egyptian novelist Khairy Shalaby died yesterday. Obituary here. Reportedly it was a “beautiful death,” swift, quiet, at home: he had a two-hour phone conversation with his friend Ibrahim Aslan, then asked his wife for something cold to drink, and when she came in with it she found him already gone.
Tonight we had dinner with my teacher, Farouk Abdel Wahab Mustafa, a longtime friend of Shalaby’s. Farouk won the 2007 Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his rendition of Shalaby’s Wikalat Attiya (The Lodging-House), which had itself won the AUC Press’s Naguib Mahfouz Award in 2003. (Review here.)
Farouk recommended I read Shalaby’s last novel, IsTasia. Three of his novels are translated; details and interviews with translators here. Info on his works in Arabic here.