Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime"—a moniker which is now trademarked by her estate—or the "Queen of Mystery". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mahfouz is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers in Arabic literature, along with Taha Hussein, to explore themes of existentialism. He is the only Egyptian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He published 35 novels, over 350 short stories, 26 screenplays, hundreds of op-ed columns for Egyptian newspapers, and seven plays over a 70-year career, from the 1930s until 2004. All of his novels take place in Egypt, and always mentions the lane, which equals the world. His most famous works include The Cairo Trilogy and Children of Gebelawi. Many of Mahfouz's works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films; no Arab writer exceeds Mahfouz in number of works that have been adapted for cinema and television. While Mahfouz's literature is classified as realist literature, existential themes appear in it.
The Sinai Peninsula, or simply Sinai, is a peninsula in Egypt, and the only part of the country located in Asia. It is between the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Red Sea to the south, and is a land bridge between Asia and Africa. Sinai has a land area of about 60,000 km2 (23,000 sq mi) and a population of approximately 600,000 people. Administratively, the vast majority of the area of the Sinai Peninsula is divided into two governorates: the South Sinai Governorate and the North Sinai Governorate. Three other governorates span the Suez Canal, crossing into African Egypt: Suez Governorate on the southern end of the Suez Canal, Ismailia Governorate in the center, and Port Said Governorate in the north.
Historical fiction is a literary genre in which a fictional plot takes place in the setting of particular real historical events. Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for historical fiction literature, it can also be applied to other types of narrative, including theatre, opera, cinema, and television, as well as video games and graphic novels. It often makes many use of symbolism in allegory using figurative and metaphorical elements to picture a story.
The Man in the High Castle (1962), by Philip K. Dick, is an alternative history novel wherein the Axis Powers won World War II. The story occurs in 1962, fifteen years after the end of the war in 1947, and depicts the life of several characters living under Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany as they rule a partitioned United States. The titular character is the mysterious author of a novel-within-the-novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a subversive alternative history of the war in which the Allied Powers are victorious.
Mary Doria Russell is an American novelist.
Herman Wouk was an American author who published fifteen novels, many being historical fiction such as The Caine Mutiny (1951), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
Exodus is a historical novel by American novelist Leon Uris about the founding of the State of Israel beginning with a compressed retelling of the voyages of the 1947 immigration ship Exodus and describing the histories of the various main characters and the ties of their personal lives to the birth of the new Jewish state.
Alice Hoffman is an American novelist and young-adult and children's writer, best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Judith Tarr is an American fantasy and science fiction author.
Egyptian Jews constitute both one of the oldest and one of the youngest Jewish communities in the world. The historic core of the Jewish community in Egypt mainly consisted of Egyptian Arabic-speaking Rabbanites and Karaites. Though Egypt had its own community of Egyptian Jews, after the Jewish expulsion from Spain more Sephardi and Karaite Jews began to migrate to Egypt, and then their numbers increased significantly with the growth of trading prospects after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As a result, Jews from many territories of the Ottoman Empire as well as Italy and Greece started to settle in the main cities of Egypt, where they thrived. The Ashkenazi community, mainly confined to Cairo's Darb al-Barabira quarter, began to arrive in the aftermath of the waves of pogroms that hit Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.
Howard Eric Jacobson is a British novelist and journalist. He writes comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters. He is a Man Booker Prize winner.
Harold Edward James Aldridge was an Australian-British writer and journalist. His World War II despatches were published worldwide and he was the author of over 30 books, both fiction and non-fiction works, including war and adventure novels and books for children.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
Alison Weir is a British author and public historian. She primarily writes about the history of English royal women and families, in the form of biographies that explore their historical setting. She has also written numerous works of historical fiction.
The Key to Rebecca is a novel by the British author Ken Follett. Published in 1980 by Pan Books (ISBN 0792715381), it was a best-seller that achieved popularity in the United Kingdom and worldwide. The code mentioned in the title is an intended throwback from Follett to Daphne du Maurier's famed suspense novel Rebecca.
The 20th century departures of foreign nationals from Egypt refers to the departure of foreign residents, primarily from European and Levantine communities. These communities consisting of British, French, Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Maltese and Jews of Egyptian descent had been established in Egypt since the 19th century. This group of foreign nationals became known as the "Egyptianized", or the Mutamassirun. The foreign resident population in Egypt numbered around 200,000 by the end of World War 1. This movement of foreign nationals leaving Egypt was precipitated by various factors such as political instability, the Suez Crisis, the abolition of the capitulations system, and the rise of Egyptian nationalism under Gamal Abdel Nasser. In 1956, Egyptian Minister of Interior Zakaria Mohieddin stated that of Egypt's 18,000 British and French citizens, 12,000 have been ordered to be expelled, with their properties seized by the Egyptian government.
David Wadsworth Ball is an American author whose novels include Empires of Sand (1999), China Run (2002) and Ironfire (2004). His short story, The Scroll, was published in Warriors (2010), and Warriors 2 (2010), anthologies assembled by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. The short story Provenance was included in an anthology entitled Rogues, published by Bantam Spectra in 2014.
Laura Pritchett is an American author whose work is rooted in the natural world. Known for championing the complex and contemporary American West and giving voice to the working class, her books have garnered the PEN USA Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the WILLA, the High Plains Book Award, and others. Both her fiction and nonfiction often focus on issues of ecology, conservation, climate change, and social justice issues.
