Taha Hussein was one of the most influential 20th-century Egyptian writers and intellectuals, and a figurehead for the Egyptian Renaissance and the modernist movement in the Middle East and North Africa. He was nominated for a Nobel prize in literature fourteen times.
Taha Hussein was born in Izbet el Kilo, a village in the Minya Governorate in central Upper Egypt. He went to a kuttab, and thereafter was admitted to El Azhar University, where he studied Religion and Arabic literature. From an early age, he was reluctant to take the traditional education to his heart. Hussein was the seventh of thirteen children, born into a lower-middle-class family. He contracted ophthalmia and became blind at the age of two, the result of faulty treatment by an unskilled practitioner.
Hussein met and married Suzanne Bresseau (1895–1989) while attending the Sorbonne in France. He originally met her when he hired her to read to him.
