(3 March 1935-7 January 2012) At the age of 77, the novelist died on Saturday of heart trouble after a brief stay at Qasr Al-Aini Hospital. Born in a village near Tanta, -- among Egypt's most celebrated contemporary writers of fiction -- grew up in Kitkat, that colourful part of the popular Cairo district of Imbaba where he spent most of his life and in which all his work is set. Aslan is perhaps best known for Dawoud Abdel-Sayed's 1991 film Al-Kitkat, based on Malek Al-Hazin (Heron, 1981), his first novel. An autodidact with almost no education, he is valued for his vernacularly inflected poetic style and, especially, his humour -- a rare quality in contemporaneous Arabic literature. In many ways Aslan is the embodiment of the Sixties aesthetic sensibility, which reflected the upward mobility of a whole class of provincially rooted writers unlikely to have emerged if not for the 1952 revolution whether they supported it or not. His is a world, in the by now hackneyed vocabulary of socially engaged criticism, of the marginalised and the disinherited -- one restricted not only by --the historical condition� of its more or less unremarkable inhabitants but also by a dogged and (to this writer) often far-fetched subtlety: the tip-of-the-iceberg approach taken to anti-intellectual extremes. Not only is the writing un-melodramatic, as a result; judging by the decline of fiction readers since the Sixties, it is also perhaps less readable than it might be. And even when he discussed middle-class family life, in his last short story collection, Hujratan wa Salah (Two Rooms and a Hall, 2009), Aslan continued to restrict both language and subject matter to the kind of minutely observed, bland but presumably revealing detail with which he created a series of small worlds in the brilliant short story collection with which he started, Buhairat Al-Massa' (Evening Pond, 1969) -- his least celebrated though perhaps his most influential work. Despite holding positions at the ministry of culture -- in this capacity he was at the centre of a censorial scandal instigated by Islamists in 2000 -- Aslan stayed clear of the corruption and nepotism that have always dogged official culture in Egypt and reportedly refused to meet the former president Hosni Mubarak; he said he was pleased to have lived to see 25 January. Notoriously unprolific but seldom idle, Aslan published four short story collections, two novels and three books of essays and anecdotes. He received the State Merit Award in 2004 and the Sawiris Award in 2006.
