Sonallah Ibrahim

Son'allah Ibrahim (Arabic: صنع الله إبراهيم‎‎ Ṣunʻ Allāh Ibrāhīm) (born 1937) is an Egyptian novelist and short story writer and one of the "Sixties Generation" who is known for his leftist and nationalist views which are expressed rather directly in his work. His novels, especially later ones, incorporate many excerpts from newspapers, magazines and other political sources as a way to enlighten the people about a certain political or social issue. Because of his political opinions he was imprisoned during the 1960s; his imprisonment is featured in his first book, a collection of short stories titled That Smell (تلك الرائحة), which was one of the first writings in Egyptian literature to adopt a modernist tinge. His last book Memoirs of the Oasis Prison returns to the same theme.

In harmony with his political ideas, in 2003 he refused to accept a prestigious literary award worth 100,000 Egyptian pounds from Egypt's Ministry of Culture.

Sonallah Ibrahim was born in Cairo. His father was an upper-middle class civil servant; his mother, from a poor background, had been a nurse hired to look after his father's paralysed first wife. Ibrahim entered Cairo University to study law in 1952. There he joined the Marxist Democratic Movement for National Liberation (DMNL). Despite the DMNL's support for Nasser's coup, Nasser moved to repress Communists in the late 1950s. Ibrahim, arrested in 1959, received a seven-year prison sentence from a military tribunal. He was released in 1964 on the occasion of Nikita Khrushchev visiting Egypt for the opening of the Aswan Dam.

Hosam Aboul-Ela of the University of Houston described Ibrahim as "a relentless internal critic of successive Egyptian regimes" and wrote that "Ibrahim might best be described as a sort of Egyptian cross between Jonathan Swift and Manuel Puig".

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