June 23, 2008	Monday	Jamadi-us-Sani 18, 1429

PARIS: Albert Cossery, an Egyptian writer who, in his adopted Paris, wrote with humour about the life of common people in his native Cairo, died on Sunday in Paris, his publisher Joelle Losfeld said. He was 94.

Cossery, whose eight books were translated into 15-odd languages, passed away in the modest streetcorner hotel that was his home for more than 60 years on the Left Bank, the literary heart of the French capital.

“A few days before he died, this magnificent man was still making his usual rounds to the Cafe de Flore and the Deux Magots,” a manager at the Louisiana hotel said, citing two famous literary haunts in the neighbourhood.

His books which blended humour, sarcasm and Oriental wisdom included “Proud Beggars”, “A Room In Cairo”, “Men God Forgot”, and his last novel, “The Colours of Infamy”, published in French in 1999 and made into a comic book.

Fans nicknamed him “the Voltaire of the Nile” and his stories were peopled with humble folk and misfits streetsweepers, thieves, prostitutes who mocked authority.

“He writes in a French that belongs entirely to him about a Cairo that exists in his memory and imagination he left Egypt decades ago,” said scholar and translator Alyson Waters in New York magazine, which last year named “Infamy” one of the world’s best novels not yet published in English.Born on Nov 3, 1913, the son of a newspaper-reading Cairo landlord father and an illiterate mother, Cossery’s early writings first appeared in French-language periodicals in Egypt in the 1930s.—AFP