Moustafa Zekri

Author and scriptwriter Mustafa Zikri was born in 1966 in Helwan near Cairo. He started studying philosophy at the University of Alexandria, but then decided to attend the Film Academy in Cairo, from which he graduated in 1992. Zikri, for one, has all the rough vitality, fascination with newness and lack of interest in structure that prevails among the grad of contemporary literature. Presenting himself as a magician in the style of Garcia Marquez, he turns out to be merely a conjurer who brings a soothingly urban brutality to his acts. It is rather the genre in which he expresses himself, and his oblique references to poverty, crime and the endless repressions of an underdeveloped society, that establish his affinity with the 1960s novelists. His first novel, Huraa' Mataha Qutiya (Drivel about a Gothic Labyrinth), like Afarit Al-Asfalt, drew on his experience of low-life Helwan and, despite a self-conscious reference to Borges, owes more to Kafka than to any Latin American or post-modernist writer.