Citizen of Nowhere

A spirited, clear-eyed account of the life and work of the author of the cult novel, Beer in the Snooker Club

Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club is hailed as one of the “best novels ever written about Egypt” (Ahdaf Soueif) and a “classic” of postcolonial literature (Pankaj Mishra). It skewers both the treachery of the British in Suez and Nasser’s police state with unprecedented comic brio.

Ghali’s family were Coptic Orthodox Christians who belonged to Egypt’s cosmopolitan elite. After his father’s early death Ghali became the poor relation, passed between relatives, without a home of his own. As a medical student in Cairo, he rioted against the British in 1948 and was packed off to Paris by his family; soon after he returned to Egypt, he was forced to flee again because he feared arrest by the new regime. In 1953, aged twenty-one, he sailed from Port Said to Tilbury Docks and spent the rest of his life in exile. Tragically, he killed himself in 1968, in the apartment of his friend and editor, Diana Athill, leaving behind six volumes of diaries.

In lively, engaging prose, Susie Thomas sets out to chart the terrain of Ghali’s life and work, drawing on his diaries, journalism, correspondence, and anecdotes from surviving friends, while Zainab Magdy explores how the translation of Beer in the Snooker Club into Arabic led to the return of the prodigal son in his own land. Citizen of Nowhere vividly illuminates Ghali’s importance as a crucial representative of postcolonial literature and examines the psychic cost exacted by statelessness on his life with humor and compassion.