Elias Khoury (Arabic: إلياس خوري‎) (born 12 July 1948, Beirut) is a Lebanese novelist, playwright, critic and a prominent public intellectual. He has published ten novels, which have been translated into several foreign languages, as well as several works of literary criticism. He has also written three plays. Between 1993 and 2009 he served as editor of Al-Mulhaq, the weekly cultural supplement of the Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Nahar.

Elias Khoury was born into a middle-class family in the predominantly Christian Ashrafiyye district of Beirut. In 1967, as Lebanese intellectual life was increasingly becoming polarised, with the opposition taking on a radical Arab nationalist and pro-Palestinian hue, Khoury travelled to Jordan where he visited a Palestinian refugee camp and then enlisted in Fatah, the largest resistance organisation in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. He left Jordan in 1970 after the Palestinian guerrilla forces in the kingdom were crushed in Black September and travelled to Paris to continue his studies. There he wrote a dissertation on the 1860 Lebanon conflict. After returning to Lebanon, he became a researcher with the Palestine Liberation Organization's research centre in Beirut. He took part in the Lebanese civil war that broke out in 1975, and was seriously injured, temporarily losing his eyesight.

Bahaa Taher (Arabic: بهاء طاهر‎, IPA: [bæˈhæːʔ ˈtˤɑːheɾ]) (born 1935 in Cairo, Egypt), sometimes transliterated as Bahaa Tahir, Baha Taher, or Baha Tahir, is an Egyptian novelist who writes in Arabic. He was awarded the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008.

Taher was born in Cairo in 1935. He graduated in literature from the University of Cairo. Upon being banned from writing in 1975, he left Egypt and travelled widely in Africa and Asia seeking work as a translator. During the 1980s and 1990s he lived in Switzerland, where he worked as a translator for the United Nations. Afterwards he returned to Egypt, where he continues to reside.

(شرق النخيل) His first novel was first published in serialized form.

(قالت ضحى)

(خالتي صفية والدير) His third novel, set in Upper Egypt, concerns a blood feud as a result of which a young Muslim man, fleeing vengeance, finds sanctuary in a Coptic monastery.

(الحب في المنفى) His fourth novel deals with the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982.

Naguib Mahfouz (Arabic: نجيب محفوظ‎ Nagīb Maḥfūẓ, IPA: [næˈɡiːb mɑħˈfuːzˤ]; 11 December 1911 – 30 August 2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism. He published over 50 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films.

Born to a lower middle-class Muslim family in the Gamaleyya quarter of Cairo, Mahfouz was named after Professor Naguib Pasha Mahfouz (1882–1974), the renowned Coptic physician who delivered him. Mahfouz was the seventh and the youngest child in a family that had five boys and two girls. The family lived in two popular districts of the town, in el-Gamaleyya, from where they moved in 1924 to el-Abbaseyya, then a new Cairo suburb; both provided the backdrop for many of Mahfouz's writings. His father, whom Mahfouz described as having been "old-fashioned", was a civil servant, and Mahfouz eventually followed in his footsteps. In his childhood Mahfouz read extensively. His mother often took him to museums and Egyptian history later became a major theme in many of his books.