Bahaa Taher

Bahaa Taher was an Egyptian novelist, short-story writer and translator (1935–2022), full name Muhammad Baha al-Din Abdullah Taher. ¹ Born in Giza to a family from Luxor, he worked as a radio drama director and broadcaster before being banned from writing in 1975, after which he left Egypt and worked as a United Nations translator in Switzerland. ² His novels include Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery, Love in Exile and Sunset Oasis, which won the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008. ²

Taher was born in Giza on 13 January 1935; his father was Azhari-educated, an influence the Arabic article traces in his works. ¹ He took a bachelor's degree in history at Cairo University in 1956 and a postgraduate diploma in media in 1973, worked as a translator for the State Information Service, and then as a drama director and broadcaster on the Second Programme, which he helped found, until 1975. ¹ After the ban on his writing he left Egypt, travelled in Africa and Asia as a translator, and lived in Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s working for the United Nations, before returning to Egypt for good. ² He died on 27 October 2022, aged 87; Wikidata records Cairo as the place of his death. ^{1 3} The sources name no religion for Taher himself; his father's Azhari education is his family's history, not his own attestation, and the Muslim and Coptic figures of his fiction are characters, so the museum records no faith for him. ^{1 3}

His novels are East of the Palms (1985), Qalat Duha (1985), Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery (1991), set in Upper Egypt, where a young Muslim fleeing a blood feud takes sanctuary in a Coptic monastery, Love in Exile (1995), which deals with the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, The Point of Light (2001), and Sunset Oasis (2007), set at the beginning of the British occupation of Egypt. ² Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery has been translated into ten languages. He received Egypt's State Award of Merit in Literature in 1998 and the Italian Giuseppe Acerbi Prize in 2000, and won the first International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008 for Sunset Oasis. ²

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