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Cairo (dpa) - Egyptian Nobel Laureate for literature Naguib Mahfouz has died in hospital, doctors at Cairo's Agouza Police Hospital said Wednesday.
The internationally celebrated 94-year-old novelist had been suffering from a bleeding ulcer and had been hospitalized since July.
Mahfouz had been admitted to the intensive care unit suffering from kidney and respiratory complications on July 19. Doctors said that he was too frail to be taken abroad for treatment.
Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in 1988. His best known works are Miramar, Small Talk on the Nile and his Cairo Trilogy, which describes life in the Egyptian capital, especially the old Islamic quarter.
Mahfouz survived an assassination attempt in 1994 when an Islamic militant stabbed him outside his Cairo home.
His novel The Children of the Alley was deemed blasphemous by fundamentalists.
The attempt damaged nerves leading to his right arm and seriously impaired his ability to write.
Born in Cairo in 1911, Naguib Mahfouz was employed as a civil servant.
He began writing when he was 17. His first novel was published in 1939. His novels frequently concealed political judgments under allegory and symbolism.
Though a long time celebrity, Mahfouz was very humble: he used to frequent downtown cafes and talk to ordinary people. It was only after the stabbing incident that he stopped doing that.
In the recent past before his illness, he only met with his friends in hotels or their homes.
The presidential palace has issued a statement offering their condolences to Mahfouz and describing him as "the writer of tolerance."
Mahfouz is to be given a military funeral Thursday.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
