Word: nobelity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mahfouz, who died last week at 94, was a true hero in this Islamophobic age, the sort of brilliant, embattled writer and public intellectual who has almost ceased to exist. Prolific and serene, Naguib-bey stood his ground, which was Egypt. He did not leave, even to collect his Nobel Prize. He wrote about growing up in Cairo, about movie stars, madmen, beggars, pashas, gods and religion. His bravest book is Children of the Alley, with its parable of Islam--banned in most Arab countries. Condemned to death in a fatwa issued by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, he continued defiantly...
When the Swedish Academy gave the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 there were still plenty of people in the U.S. who had no idea that there was such a thing as an Egyptian novelist. Mahfouz, who died Wednesday at 94, was the avatar of an Arab culture a lot of Americans had no concept of: a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, humane, humorous literary culture very different from the Islamic fundamentalism that was more visible on the evening news...
...disciplined routine. "A writer must sit down to write every day, pick up his pen and try to write something - anything - on a piece of paper," he once said. (According to legend, when the Swedish ambassador paid him a call to inform him that he'd been awarded the Nobel, Mahfouz's wife refused to disturb him: he was taking his regular...
...Mahfouz suffered some backlash after he won the Nobel. The Western press was quick to take him up as the literary voice of the Arab world, and in turn some Arab critics took him to task for being too moderate and Western-friendly. In truth he was his own man, concerned only with a personal and human truth older and greater than politics. "I am a very old man, an introvert," he once told an interviewer, who wasn't sure whether Mahfouz was joking or not. "So winning the Nobel was really terrible for me. I won the prize...
...come out finally." GUNTER GRASS, Nobel-prizewinning German author and peace activist, after admitting that he had served in Hitler's élite Waffen SS; he told a German newspaper it had been weighing heavily on his mind...