The Sotheby's London auction house announced Thursday that it will offer a major cache of manuscripts by Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz for sale next Thursday.
Sotheby's has estimated the value of the archive at 50,000 to 70,000 British pounds. “This extraordinarily rich and diverse group of manuscripts spans seven decades of the author's career, from the 1930s to his death in 2006,” reads a statement released by Sotheby's.
"It is an immense honour to be offering what is to the best of our knowledge, the first manuscript material by Naguib Mahfouz to appear at public auction ― much of it previously unpublished,” Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby's senior manuscripts specialist, says in the statement.
Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, is recognized as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq al-Hakim, to explore existentialist themes.
Mahfouz published more than 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.
Mahfouz died on 30 August 2006 in a Cairo hospital. At the time of his death, he was the only Arabic-language writer to have won the Nobel Prize.
