السير والملاحم الشعبية العربية

Shawky Abdel Hakim: An Egyptian playwright, novelist, and researcher in folklore and ethnography. He is one of the most important writers who collected the Egyptian heritage and presented it in a theatrical and documentary form. Ahmed Shawky Abdel Hakim Hilal was born in 1934 in the Fayoum Governorate, and since his childhood he was inclined to listen to the tales of peasants, maddahs, “magnobias” and female mourners, and this influence became evident in his interest in popular literature after that. He graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Department of Philosophy, Cairo University, in 1958. In the early sixties, Shawqi Abdel Hakim was arrested for political reasons, then in the seventies he emigrated to London for eight years, during which he worked for the British BBC Radio, and as a journalist for several other newspapers, during which time he frequently visited theaters and libraries. From London, Shawky traveled to Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Abdul Hakim’s works varied between plays, novels, research and articles, and he began publishing the book “Farmer’s Literature”, in which he collected many rural Egyptian folk tales that he heard during his childhood and adolescence in the village, some of which were converted into famous cinematic works such as: “Hassan and Naima” and “Shafiqa and Metwally”, and the book has been greatly admired by contemporary critics. During his arrest, he wrote the two plays: “Saad al-Yateem” and “Atma.” During his life in Beirut, he depicted what he had seen in the novel “Beirut Weeping at Night,” which was translated into many languages. He also presented many texts in improvised theater, and their number reached sixteen . He specialized in his studies in folklore, and his vision for this type of theater was that it resembles folk biographies and epics, and in it a presentation of the true Egyptian spirit with which the audience interacts. Among his most prominent works is the "Encyclopedia of Arab Folklore and Mythology" in which he sailed on a journey of Arab myths with the aim of re-understanding the psychology of the Arab man in the present era. He has represented Egypt in many international conferences, and won many theater awards. Shawqi Abdel Hakim died after a struggle with illness in 2003, leaving forty-six books on arts, heritage and literature.