Naguib Mahfouz was born in Gamaliya, one of the oldest neighborhoods of medieval Cairo, the youngest of seven children. When he was seven, he watched from his window the street demonstrations of the 1919 revolution against British rule, and the crowded lanes, cafés and houses of old Cairo became the world of his fiction.

He studied philosophy at Cairo University, and then, for nearly forty years, he worked as a civil servant in the Egyptian government, writing in the afternoons and evenings. He was famously punctual and regular, walking the same route each morning and meeting his friends at the same cafés on the same evenings. The discipline produced more than thirty novels and hundreds of short stories.

His masterpiece is the Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street, published in 1956 and 1957. It follows a merchant, al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, and three generations of his family from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second. The father is a tyrant at home and a charming pleasure-seeker outside it; his wife, Amina, is confined to the house; their children grow up into the political and religious upheavals of modern Egypt. It has often been compared to the great family novels of Europe.

His next novel, Children of Gebelawi, an allegory that retells the stories of the prophets in a Cairo alley, was serialized in a newspaper in 1959 and caused an uproar among religious authorities. It was not published as a book in Egypt for decades. In 1988 Mahfouz became the first Arabic-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his work was translated around the world.

In 1994, when he was eighty-two, an extremist stabbed him in the neck outside his home. He survived, but the attack damaged nerves in his right hand, and for a long time he could write for only a few minutes a day. He kept working with help, dictating short pieces he called dreams, until his death in 2006.