Gaber Asfour was one of the most influential thinkers and literary critics in Egypt and the Arab World. We were honored to have him as a member of our board of trustees in arabworldbooks.com since 2004 until he passed away in December 2021.
Born 25 March 1944 in El-Mahalla El-Kubra, Egypt. He graduated from the Arabic Language Department of the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University in 1965 after which he started his academic career at the University. He was appointed as head of the Arabic language department at Cairo University in 1990. In 1992 , he held the post of the General Secretary of the Supreme Council for Culture where he focused on the department of literary translations. Later on, founding and heading the National Center for Translation.
During the 2011 Egyptian protests he was appointed minister of culture, only to resign after one week in office, citing health problems as the reason for his resignation.
Asfour was also editor-in-chief of Fousoul, a literary quarterly publication, for several years. He was very active in many literary groups.
Among his most prominent books are (The Ordeal of Enlightenment) and ( The Lights of Reason), (Time of the Novel), (The Seduction of Heritage), (Literary Criticism and Cultural Identity), (Criticism of the Culture of Underdevelopment), (Challenges of the Contemporary Critic), (A Beautiful Time Has Passed), (On Loving Poetry) and (Margins on the Enlightenment Notebook ). He received the Tunisian Cultural Medal in 1995, the Sultan Al Owais Award in the field of literary studies and criticism in 1997, the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture in 2008, the State Appreciation Award in the field of literature in 2009, the National Reward Medal from the rank of a leader from Morocco in 2010, and the Nile Prize in Literature in 2019.
Asfour passed on 31 December 2021, at the age of 77.
