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Fuʾād Ḥaddād (1927–85) was a poet who wrote in colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Born in Cairo to a Lebanese father, he was well versed in Classical Arabic and the colloquial traditions and was educated in French. He was instrumental in the birth of shiʿr al-ʿāmmiyya al-miṣriyya, a movement of poetry in the Egyptian colloquial dialect that veered away from the poetics of zajal, a traditional form of colloquial verse, and moved towards that of the contemporaneous modernist Arabic poetry. Ṣalāḥ Jāhīn (d. 1986), another pioneer of shiʿr al-ʿāmmiyya, whose first anthology was published in …

Fatḥī Ghānim (1924–99) was an Egyptian writer and journalist. He worked at several government-owned periodicals. In 1959 he became chief editor of the weekly Ṣabāḥ al-khayr; in 1968 he was appointed editor of the daily al-Jumhūriyya; and in 1973 he became chief editor of the weekly Rūz al-Yūsuf. The latter magazine’s critical coverage of the Egyptian bread riots of January 1977 led to his removal from the editorship on the orders of President Anwar al-Sādāt. Ghānim wrote seventeen novels, which are an important contribution to modern Egyptian fiction. They are characte…