Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. Of his nearly forty novels, the most famous is The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations. In 1988, he was the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in August 2006.