Alaa Al Aswany

Al Aswany trained as a dentist in Cairo and Chicago and has continued practicing dentistry alongside writing fiction, running a clinic in a real downtown Cairo building that inspired his best-known novel. He also co-founded the pro-democracy movement Kefaya in the early 2000s and remained an outspoken critic of the Mubarak and later el-Sisi governments, work that pushed him into exile.

The Yacoubian Building (2002) gathers a cross-section of residents in one decaying downtown apartment block (a closeted magazine editor, a corrupt businessman, a doorman's son radicalized by poverty and humiliation) into a panorama of Egyptian society's fractures under Mubarak. It became the bestselling Arabic novel of its decade and was adapted into a major Egyptian film.

He supported the 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square and continued writing pointed political fiction and journalism until government pressure forced him to relocate abroad, where he now lives.