Quote by Naguib Mahfouz: “Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”

We often think of home as the place we came from, but belonging is something different — it is where we stop running, where we let our guard down, where we do not need to prove ourselves. Home is not inherited, it is found or made, often in unexpected places and through unexpected people.

Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, bringing Arab literature unprecedented global attention. He wrote in a period of profound instability in Egypt and the broader Arab world, including the 1967 war with Israel, Nasser's nationalism, and Sadat's peace deal with Israel, all of which shaped his fiction's themes of displacement and belonging.

Egyptian novelist and the first Arab writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1988. His Cairo Trilogy — Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street — is considered one of the masterworks of Arabic fiction, depicting Egyptian society from the early twentieth century through the 1952 revolution.