By day a Cairo dentist and by night a novelist, he spent years struggling to get published. Today, Alaa Al Aswany is a best-selling writer across the globe.
Aswany was born in Cairo in 1957. His father was also a novelist, who won the state award for literature in 1972. "He was my first professor of literature. He told me what to read and what not to read," said Aswany, who had a traditional French education and then went to Chicago to study for his dentistry degree.
In 2002, his novel The Yacoubian Building, was quietly accepted by a small, independ-ent publisher in Cairo. Its first, edition sold out in four weeks and it was the Arab world's best-seller for five successive years, selling 250,000 copies in a region where print runs seldom go beyond 3,000. Word spread quickly, people talked about it. It was made into a hit film and a TV serial, and has since been translated into 27 languages.
Aswany said, "Society is a living organism and you must keep up. That's why I still practise, though for only two days a week. I will never close the clinic (诊所). The clinic is my window. I open it to see what is happening in the street. You can't get disconnected from the street, as a writer; that's a common mistake. You can be too easily welcomed every night by the richest people and the most influential. It is very dangerous because it is that relationship with the street that made you successful in the first place."
