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A spirited, clear-eyed account of the life and work of the author of the cult novel, Beer in the Snooker Club
Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club is hailed as one of the “best novels ever written about Egypt” (Ahdaf Soueif) and a “classic” of postcolonial literature (Pankaj Mishra). It skewers both the treachery of the British in Suez and Nasser’s police state with unprecedented comic brio.
Ghali’s family were Coptic Orthodox Christians who belonged to Egypt’s cosmopolitan elite. After his father’s early death Ghali became the poor relation, passed between relatives, without a home of his own. As a medical student in Cairo, he rioted against the British in 1948 and was packed off to Paris by his family; soon after he returned to Egypt, he was forced to flee again because he feared arrest by the new regime. In 1953, aged twenty-one, he sailed from Port Said to Tilbury Docks and spent the rest of his life in exile. Tragically, he killed himself in 1968, in the apartment of his friend and editor, Diana Athill, leaving behind six volumes of diaries.
In lively, engaging prose, Susie Thomas sets out to chart the terrain of Ghali’s life and work, drawing on his diaries, journalism, correspondence, and anecdotes from surviving friends, while Zainab Magdy explores how the translation of Beer in the Snooker Club into Arabic led to the return of the prodigal son in his own land. Citizen of Nowhere vividly illuminates Ghali’s importance as a crucial representative of postcolonial literature and examines the psychic cost exacted by statelessness on his life with humor and compassion.
Susie Thomas received her PhD in English literature from the University of London. She has published academic articles on London writers from Aphra Behn to Martin Amis. Her Reader’s Guide to Hanif Kureishi appeared in 2005 and she was the Reviews Editor of The Literary London Journal until 2020. Her most recent book, So We Live: The Novels of Alexander Baron (2019), was edited with Ken Worpole and Andrew Whitehead. She is a regular contributor to the London Fictions website.
Zainab Magdy is an academic, performer, visual artist, and writer based in Cairo. Her creative work and research explore personal narratives, archives, and memory. She was a resident artist at the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Literarische Colloquium, Berlin, and the Cité Internationale des Art in Paris. Zainab taught at the Department of English Literature, Cairo University, for fifteen years. In 2023 she completed her PhD on Waguih Ghali’s writings with a focus on life-writing genres.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Where’s Waguih?
1. The Personal History and Adventures of Young Waguih Ghali
2. Fear Eats the Soul
3. Before a Funeral
4. Eyeless in Gaza
5. London Kills Me
6. Return of the Prodigal Author