Bahaa Taher was born in Cairo in 1935, but had roots in Luxor. His bachelor’s degree was in history and literature and his postgraduate degree in media from the University of Cairo in 1973. He was active in left-wing circles and contributed to the avant-garde literary magazine Galerie 68. He published his first short story in 1964, and his debut collection appeared in 1972. In Sadat’s Egypt in the 1970s, his books were censored. He lived in Switzerland between 1981 and 1995, where he worked as a translator for the United Nations and published a number of novels and short story collections from abroad. He then returned to Egypt where he continued to write novels, becoming one of the country’s most beloved authors. Several of his books have been translated into a number of languages including English, French, and German. Bahaa Taher co-founded Writers and Artists for Change within the opposition Kifaya movement, which in 2004 campaigned for political change. In 1998 he was awarded the Egyptian State Prize of Merit for Literature, and the Italian Giuseppe Acerbi Prize in 2000. In 2008 he won the first International Prize for Arabic Literature for his novel, Sunset Oasis. Taher died on 27 October 2022, at the age of 87.