Event 15 Wednesday 10 March, 8.30pmAl Ras 1Youssef Ziedan was born in Upper Egypt in 1958 and at the age of 8 moved to Alexandria, where he later entered the university to study philosophy. His academic work has focused on Sufism and other branches of Islamic philosophy and he is director of the Manuscript Centre and Museum affiliated to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Author of more than fifty works of philosophy, history of medicine and information science as well as a volume of literary criticism, he is now most widely known for his bestselling second novel, Azazil which won the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the ‘Arabic Booker’).

The novel revolves around events that took place in the fifth century AD between Upper Egypt, Alexandria and northern Syria in an uneasy period of Christian history after the Roman Empire had adopted the ‘new’ religion. It highlights the subsequent internal doctrinal conflicts arising between the fathers of the Church on the one hand, and between the ‘new’ believers and receding paganism on the other. Azazil, whose English title is Beelzebub, has disturbing echoes for today with its tale of religious fanaticism and mob violence and sparked an outcry among some of Egypt's ten million Coptic Christians, who wanted it banned.

Yousef will be reading from Azazil and talking about the controversy stirred by the book’s publication, the impact of winning the ‘Arabic Booker’ and his thoughts about the book’s translation into English and its publication later this year.

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