Ashraf Aboul-Yazid, the Transcontinental Writer

Ibrahim Abdel Meguid is one of the most prominent contemporary Egyptian novelists. He has enriched the Arabic library with a large number of novels that have left a profound impact on the cultural consciousness, including Night of Love and Blood, The Other Place, The Jasmine House, No One Sleeps in Alexandria, Birds of Amber, and Clouds Over Alexandria. In addition to his novels, he has published five short story collections: The Trees and the Birds, Closing the Windows, Spaces, Old Ships, and The Night We Survived. His literary presence has transcended the Arabic language through multiple translations: The Other Place was translated into English, French, and German; No One Sleeps in Alexandria into English and French; and The Jasmine House into French.

Throughout his career, Abdel Meguid has been awarded many prestigious prizes, including the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature (1996) for The Other Place, the Cairo International Book Fair Award for Best Novel (1996) for No One Sleeps in Alexandria, the State Award for Excellence in Literature (2004), the State Appreciation Award in Literature (2007), the Katara Prize for Arabic Novel for Adagio (2015), and, crowning his achievements, Egypt’s highest cultural honor, the Nile Award in 2022.

In our creative and cultural life, there is a personality open to the whole world—in Egypt, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He is the writer and creator in the fields of the novel, poetry, children’s and young adult literature, and translation: Ashraf Aboul-Yazid. He usually attaches to his name the word “Dali,” whose closest meaning(in Arabic) is “the man who keeps lowering his bucket into the well without ever stopping.” Perhaps it also holds a significance in one of the cultures he encountered during his journeys in Asia.

I have followed Ashraf and his works as circumstances allowed me for many years, and I sometimes find myself wondering: does Ashraf truly live among us, or is he perpetually roaming the world? He has traveled to and written about more than thirty Asian and European countries, including Korea, Germany, India, Turkey, Spain, Tatarstan, and many more. In addition, he has worked for newspapers and magazines such as Al-Arabi in Kuwait and Nizwa in Oman; as a cultural correspondent for news agencies such as Reuters; and as a translator for the Arab Advertising Agency in Muscat, among others.

On the artistic side, Ashraf represents a rare phenomenon—his creativity spanning every field of expression, enriched further by his studies in fine arts and the biographies of others. I know that he is Egyptian, born in Benha in 1963, but he has taken on many roles in Egypt and abroad—some of which I have mentioned. This has led to his winning the Arab Journalism Award and his presidency of the Asia Journalist Association.

Ashraf has published poetry collections such as Whisper of the Sea, The Shells, Memory of Silence, and Memory of Butterflies. His novels include Shamous, A Backyard, and The Dragoman. In studies and biography, his works include Biography of Color: Studies in Contemporary Fine Arts, Sheikh Mustafa Abdel-Raziq: A Traveler and Resident, The River of Women: Autobiography of Art, Naguib Mahfouz: The Narrator and the Artist, and The Silk Road, a richly illustrated cultural encyclopedia.

In travel literature, he has authored Biography of a Traveler, A River on a Journey, and A Caravan of Moroccan Tales. Among his translations are Me and Surrealism: The Secret Confessions of Salvador Dalí, published by Dubai Cultural Magazine and distributed free as issue no. 38; Ten Thousand Lives by the Korean poet Ko Un; A Monotonous Space That Invites Sadness by the Indian poet Hemant Divate; and several other titles in the Silk Road Creativity Series, which he himself curates.

For children’s literature, his works include Korean Tales (translated folk stories), The Arab Travelers (within the Al-Arabi Al-Saghir series, where he published extensively), and My Cat Writes a Book, which won the Sawiris Cultural Award for Children’s Literature in 2023.

His works have been translated into other languages: his novel Shamous into Korean, his poetry into Spanish, as well as into Turkish, Persian, English, and others. His articles and poems have appeared in dozens of foreign newspapers and magazines.

Recently, I read his book Naguib Mahfouz: The Narrator and the Artist, published by the Egyptian Book Organization. It is a fascinating journey into the artistic backdrop that shaped Mahfouz’s novels and stories, alongside the journey of visual artists who illustrated his works since their first publication. Names and milestones such as Hussein Fawzi, Gamal Qutb, Seif Wanly, Mohamed Heggy, and Salah Enani appear throughout the book. Thus, it is filled with images and their relationship to text, place, and composition, as well as posters of films adapted from Mahfouz’s novels.

The book also engages with the controversies stirred by certain novels, such as Children of the Alley and Adrift on the Nile, and how the illustrations first appeared in Al-Ahram newspaper and later in book editions. It is an artistic journey that goes beyond the visual arts and Mahfouz’s literary imagery, extending into cinema and his fascination with visual storytelling.

The second book is a collection of selected poems by Ashraf, published by Al-Nasher Publishing and Distribution within the vibrant Silk Road Series. These poems, spanning the years 1989–2024, I read with deep engagement and delight, moved by the imagery and human meanings they carried—meanings that would require a larger space to fully explore. I will only cite here his poem “Map of an Old Sorrow”:

It slips between your ribs like a serpent,
Searching for a hole in the apple of your heart,
For a deserted path toward memory.
It will search the secret drawers
For something you had erased,
Pour oil upon it and set it ablaze,
Then sing ecstasy
Upon the road of return.

And so, I leave you to enter the world happily, accompanied by the works of Ashraf Dali, the transcontinental writer—in life and in truth.