Albert Cossery (3 November 1913 – 22 June 2008) was an Egyptian-born French writer of Levantine origin. Although Cossery lived most of his life in Paris and only wrote in the French language, all of his novels were either set in his home country of Egypt or in an imaginary Middle Eastern country. He was nicknamed "The Voltaire of the Nile". His writings pay tribute to the humble and to the misfits of his childhood in Cairo, as well as praise a form of laziness and simplicity very distant from our contemporary society.
Albert Cossery was well known in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where he lived in the same hotel, Hotel La Louisiane, since 1945.
His books, which always take place in Egypt or other Arab countries, portray the contrast between poverty and wealth, the powerful and the powerless, in a witty although dramatic way. His writing mockas vanity and the narrowness of materialism and his principal characters are mainly vagrants, thieves or dandies that subvert the order of an unfair society. His novels often feature auto-biographical characters, like Teymour, the hero of the novel Un complot de saltimbanques, a young man who forges a diploma in chemical engineering after a life of enjoyment and lust abroad instead of study and gets back to his home town and enters into an unexpected intringue against the authorities with his dandy friends. He is considered by some to be the last genuine "anarchist" or free thinking writer of western culture by his humorous and provocative although lucid and profound view of human relations and society. His writing style does not submit to an academic or experimental approach which makes him a vivid, catchy storyteller, without the boredom nor artificial ambiguity of some classical (which he is) or avantgarde writers. The sageness of his works are monuments to the freedom of being and thought against materialism, the contemporary obsession with consumption and productivity, the arrogance and abuse of authority, the vanity of social formalities and the injustice of the wealthy towards the poor.
