Muhammad Aladdin

Muhammad Aladdin, also known as Alaa Eddin (Arabic:محمـد علاء الديـن) is an Egyptian novelist, short story writer, and script writer.

His first collection of short stories was published in 2003, and he is the author of five novels—The Gospel According to Adam, The Twenty-Second Day, The Idol (novel), The Foot (novel), and A Well-Trained Stray—and four short story collections—The Other Shore (Short-stories collection), The Secret Life of Citizen M, Young Lover, New Lover, and The Season of Migration to Arkidea.

A 2017's Sawiris Cultural Award winner; Aladdin has emerged as one of the idiosyncratic talents of the 2000s and of the noted writers in both Egypt and the Arab countries, and has been described as "an innovator in the Arabic literature. Aladdin has gained acclamation for his first novel published ‘’The Gospel According to Adam’’ (Arabic:’’’إنجيل آدم’’’) in January 2006. The work has been hailed by writers like Bahaa Taher and Sonallah Ibrahim to be among the best of a promising new crop. That novel breaks the conventional format of the novel, consisting as it does of a single 60-page-long paragraph that is written in a stream of consciousness style. A reviewer for Al-Ahram’s literary page on May 10, 2006, stated that ‘’The Gospel According to Adam’' reflects “a social reality that has lost all certainties".

In his book, "The Arab Novel and the Quest for Renovation" published by Dubi Althaqafia Magazine in May 2011, the Moroccan writer and critic Mohammed Berrada named it as one of five novels that have renovated the Arab novel.

Aladdin was chosen as one of the most important Egyptian writers in the new millennium by the Egyptian magazine Akhbar Al-Adab in 2011, and one of the ‘’Six Egyptian writers you don’t know but you should’’ as the writer Pauls Toutonghi said in The millions.com.

In May 2013, Aladdin gave a keynote speech in the name of the young Egyptian writers, in the First Convention for Egyptian Writers against the Muslim Brotherhood regime ruling Egypt back then, who were claiming to dissolve Egypt’s Ministry of Culture in order to establish a new republic.

However, Aladdin spoke openly against the new regime in Egypt after 2013 Egyptian coup d'état and refused to participate in the Second conviction saying to ArabLit magazine, on October 23, 2013, that ‘’They would use us as make-up for the same ugly face’’.

As a consequence, he was banned from article writing in Egypt.

Aladdin wrote for MTV’s Rebel Music about Ramy Essam as ‘’The Revolution Singer’’ in November 2013.

Along with the American translation of the main title story, a Russian translation for one of the stories within it, The Voice (short story), was published by the Russian newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets in their Egypt edition, translated by Sarali Gintsburg.

The Egyptian writer Ibrahim Farghali wrote about it in the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar that The Gospel According to Adam is "An experimental and substantial leap in narration style in the modern Egyptian novels", while his latest A Well-Trained Stray, published in 2014, has been described in both Egyptian and Italian critique as "a mirror for a whole generation", sometimes compared to The Great Gatsby.

In March 2014, the same story was translated to Italian by Barbra Benini and published in Editoriaraba, a notable Italian blog dedicated to Arabic Literature, in 24 hours it was reblogged on the blog MedShake on the ISPI website, an Italian prestigious research institute on international politics.

The novel was the only book in Arabic presented at the Turin International Book Fair in May 2016, and the author was named along with renowned writers of Arabic literature like Adunis, Yasmina Khadra, and Tahar Ben Jelloun.