Ahmed Fagih

is a Libyan author and playwright. Born in the oasis village of Mizda, near Tripoli, in 1965, at the age of 22, he was awarded a prize for his first book of short stories.

He has worked in many capacities in the fields of culture and the media. He has a PhD in the Libyan Short Story from the University of Edinburgh. Then,back in Libya he became director of the Institute of Music and Drama and head of the Department of Arts and Literature at the Ministry of Information and Culture. He also founded the Union of Libyan Writers, of which he was for a time secretary-general. In 1977 he became press counsellor at the Libyan Embassy in London. There he established the Arab Cultural Trust, which launched the glossy cultural quarterly magazine Azure of which he was editor-in-chief.

Some of his work has been translated into English; the plays Gazelles (performed at the Shaw Theatre in London in 1982) and Evening Visitor, his trilogy Gardens of the Night (Quartet, 1995) and The Valley of Ashes. In 2000, Kegan Paul International published a 5-volume collection of his short stories and plays. He has published in Cairo his 12-volume historical saga Maps of the Soul.  An English edition this year of the first three novels will be published in 2011 by Darf Publishers (London).

Alongside his literary career Ahmed Fagih has served in several diplomatic posts over the past decade, and has headed his country’s diplomatic missions in Greece, and Romania. For the past few years he has been located mainly in Cairo.