Egyptian writer Ibrahim Aslan was born in Tanta in 1935. His family soon thereafter moved permanently to the Kit Kat neighborhood of Imbaba, a popular quarter of Cairo, which became the setting for his short stories and novels. Though a contemporary of the Generation of the 60s, Aslan developed his own unique style, mixing colloquial and formal registers of Arabic, foregrounding the telling of stories, and insisting on a light sense of humor, even when his subjects are dark. His characters speak Egyptian and live banal lives filled with frustration and stalled revolutions, and most of all, they laugh. His pathbreaking novel chronicling the 1977 Bread Riots -- Malik al-Hazin (1983) -- was adapted into the film Kit Kat and translated into a number of languages. The English translation, The Heron, was published by AUC Press. The translation of ‘Asafir al-Nile, Nile Sparrows, was also published by AUC Press. His is the author of non-fiction works, memoirs and short story collections, including Buhayrat al-misa` (1971) and Yusuf wa-l-rida` (1986), and Hikayat min Fadlallah Uthman (2003). For many years, Aslan was the Cairo-based culture editor for al-Hayat newspaper. He passed away on January 7, 2012.
