Professor Hamdi Sayyid Ahmed El Sakkout

Hamdi El-Sakkout received a bachelor’s degree in Arabic Language and Literature from Cairo University, a Diploma of Education from Ain Shams University, and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in the U.K. He is a distinguished scholar and a former Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and the Director of Research and Arabic Studies Centers at the American University in Cairo (AUC).

Professor Al-Sakkout’s publications cover a wide range of literary issues, including editions and translations of Arabic documents of the Ottoman period, studies of the Egyptian novel and short story, and current trends in literary criticism. He is credited for his detailed bibliographic study of the life and works of Abbas Mahmud Al-Aqqad, one of the most celebrated modern Arab writers. The book is part of a series of exhaustive bibliographic studies entitled Leaders of Contemporary Arab Literature in Egypt. Five other volumes, comprising bibliographies of Taha Hussayn, Ibrahim Abd al-Gadir al-Mazini, Abd al-Rahman Shukri, Muhammad Hussayn Haikal, and Tawfiq al-Hakim, were co-authored with the late Professor Marsden Jones. He also edited The Modern Arabic Novel: Bibliography and Critical Introduction, an immense 6-volume text covering more than 4,600 individual novels written in Arabic from 1865 to 1995.

Professor Al-Sakkout is a member of leading cultural organizations in Egypt, a life member of Claire Hall at Cambridge University, a former Visiting Professor to the University of California, Berkeley and Washington University in Seattle and organizer of the AUC Arabic Cultural Program.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.