Yahya Haqqi

Yahya Haqqi (Arabic:يحيى حقي) (7 January 1905 – 9 December 1992) (or Yehia Hakki, Yehia Haqqi) was an Egyptian writer and novelist. Born to a middle-class family in Cairo, he was a lawyer by profession who graduated from the Cairo School of Law in 1925. Like many other Egyptian writers, such as Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris, he spent most of his life as a civil servant, supplementing his literary income; he eventually rose to become adviser to the National Library of Egypt. In his literary career, he published four collections of short stories, one novel (Umm Hashem's Lamp), and many articles and other short stories. He was editor of the literary magazine Al-Majalla from 1961 to 1971 when that publication was banned in Egypt. He experimented with the various literary norms: the short story, the novel, literary criticism, essays, meditations, and literary translation.