Ibrahim Farghali

Ibrahim Farghali (إبراهيم فرغلي; born 19 September 1967 in Mansoura, Egypt) is an Egyptian writer.

He grew up in Oman and United Arab Emirates.

He obtained a BA in Business Administration from Mansoura University in 1992 and worked as a journalist in Rose al Yousef weekly magazine, then in Nizwa magazine in Muscat - Sultanate of Oman before going back to Cairo again to work as a cultural editor in Al Ahram newspaper since 1997.

Now he is an editor in Al Arabi monthly magazine in Kuwait.

Ibrahim Farghali is a critic and a fiction author, one of who called Nineties Generation in Egypt.

In Egypt Farghali himself is part of this generation.

But on the Arabic literary scene, which is shaped by strict hierarchies, new voices have a hard time being heard.

Especially when, like Farghali, they abstain from running roughshod over Egyptian society's moral and religious taboos in order to attract attention to themselves.

Farghali by contrast dwells in the realm of quiet tones – and does so without compromise.

A state-run publisher demanded that he remove all sexual overtones from his manuscript for "The Ghosts of Feelings" before publishing it.

But since that was out of the question for Farghali, he has no choice but to put up with the vagaries and lack of professionalism of the few remaining independent Egyptian literary publishers.

He was just 24 years old when as a fledgling journalist he interviewed Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz.

His yearning for literature had become so overpowering that, just one year after completing his unloved course of studies in his small hometown of Mansoura, he moved to the big city of Cairo.

In his works to date, Ibrahim Farghali has explored a variety of themes.

In the short story collection (Ashbah Al Hawas) "The Ghosts of Feelings" he attempts to explore the relationship between Egyptian men and women, who come from utterly disparate backgrounds.

Again and again, he tells the same story, but from a different perspective.

By doing so, Farghali is trying to demonstrate how limited our understanding of people really is.

Farghali configures the female body as a site of contradiction that creates chances for proximity and/or estrangement.

Even when metamorphosed it does not represent an element of mystery but is taken as a given.

He uses the fantastic to uncover moral degeneration in inhibited social relationships based on fantasy-bonds.

As a literary critic, Farghali has been the quickest to dismiss such middle-brow, best-selling "phenomena" as Alaa Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building; and his principal argument against such books is that they pander to a growing but limited—and limiting—worldwide market, that "they are not novels at all, but illusions".

Yet from a history-of-literature point of view, Abnaa Al-Gabalwi is probably the closest we have come to a fulfilment of the prophecy that a home-grown Magic Realism Movement would emerge in the new millennium.

1-Bettejah Al Ma'aqi (toward the eyes) Sharqeyyat 1997, a short story collection.

2-Kahf Al Farashat (Cave of Butterflies) Cairo 1998.

a novel.

3-Ashbah El Hawas (Ghosts of Senses) a short story collection.

4- The Smiles of the Saints Ibtisamat Al Qideiseen.

2004, 2005,2006( translated into English by Andy Smart and Nadya Fouda Smart, published by Auc Press in 2007).

Published by Al Ain Publishing house in 2006.

7- Abnaa' Al Gabalawi (Sons of Gabalwi)a novel.

5- Jenneya Fi Qarora (Jennie in a Bottle), a novel, Al Ain publishing house 2007, 2009.

6- Midad Al Hewar (dialogue Ink) a travel book about Stuttgart in Germany as a part from the project (Town Chronicles funded by Goethe Institute).

Published by Al Ain Publishing house - Cairo 2009, 2010.

Quotes By Farghali