His story

1936 Enters the Nile Primary SchoolIn the mid-1930s the family moved to the town of Beni Suef. His father gave up his headship to teach at the Orphans' Institute there, for the sake of his son's schooling. They lived on Gisr al-Bahr Street and later near Midan Mawlid al-Nabi. The wall of the boy's bedroom backed onto a church whose bells he could hear, and most of his football teammates were Copts. One day the bookseller, Uncle Tawfiq, let him take the week's story on credit, and only then did the boy notice that the man was Christian. It had never occurred to him, for ‘in our town we made no distinction between Christian and Muslim’. Years later that memory made it easy for him to write The Crescent and the Cross.

1939 War breaks out in his fourth primary yearFrom the balcony he watched demonstrations for the constitution fill the street, and the scene stayed with him until, years later, it became a long run of radio programmes about the constitution. At the private Nile Primary School and then at Prince Farouk Secondary School in Beni Suef he was, in his own words, ‘always among the top five, but never first!’ He passed the primary certificate examination 57th out of more than 2,500 pupils in the Beni Suef, Fayoum and Minya zone.

1945 Finishes secondary school as the war endsReading was his real school. He loved stories ‘like all the world's children’, and believed he loved them more. He devoured the weekly Qissati (My Story) booklets written by a local Arabic teacher, Mustafa Mohamed Ibrahim, and Said al-Erian's School Library series. He shared books rented from Uncle Hanna with his friend Fomeil Labib, and sat on the pavement retelling Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes to the neighbourhood children. He haunted the municipal library until its sheikh-librarian handed him the keys. An older boy who wrote chess games down in notation taught him a lesson he kept all his life: for everything in the world, there are books about it.

He was no bookworm hiding from the street. He captained the neighbourhood team and signed its challenge letters ‘Abdo Youssef, captain of the Nile team’. He played football with a ball made of old socks, he admitted, ‘until I graduated from university, without embarrassment!’ Every summer the family went back to Shenra, crossing the Bahr Yusuf by ferry. There he picked cotton, guarded the crops, listened to the epic of Abu Zayd al-Hilali against al-Zanati Khalifa, and heard his farmer uncle grieve over the Nile flood. There he learned ‘the value of greenery and the wonder of a drop of water’. The people he met in those summers became the characters of The Scarecrow.

The Second World War broke out when he was in the fourth year of primary school. Exercise books soared in price, and bread, sugar and kerosene grew scarce; an Arabic teacher dictated to the class a mournful elegy called ‘The Loaf’. He finished secondary school as the war ended, ‘still wearing short trousers’. He was nearly seventeen, and he took with him a small, tolerant town, a village full of stories, and the certainty that books were the way forward.

“I am certain that my village taught me as much as school did. Indeed, I think it surpassed school in shaping my life and the rural values that stayed with me.”

1945 Enters Fouad I UniversityIn the summer of 1945 he rode the bus alone from Beni Suef to Cairo, a journey of ten hours. When he got off, the conductor joked, ‘Your father almost asked me for a receipt for you.’ He enrolled in the Faculty of Commerce at Fouad I University, today Cairo University, and lodged at first in a rooftop laundry room six floors up. His first year went badly and he had to make it up in the summer, but by then he had found something that mattered more than the syllabus: al-Mazini's Spider's Threads. He went to the second-hand stalls along the Azbakiyya wall and bought everything al-Mazini had written. When his father sent money for his first suit, he spent all of it on books. In his third year he chose political science, as he put it, ‘to escape numbers and accounting’.

1946 First piece published in Rose al-YoussefJournalism was his first way into writing. He wrote to Ihsan Abdel Quddous asking to train at Rose al-Youssef, and his first published piece, ‘Love at the University’, appeared there; he kept the clipping for sixty-five years. At eighteen he was answering readers in the ‘Letters of the Heart’ column, advising a boy his own age to go looking for chocolate rather than love. When Abdel Quddous discovered how young his agony uncle was, he laughed; the young man's own verdict was, ‘I am an old man of eighteen!’ In the summer of 1948 he moved to the daily Al-Asas, where he shared a desk with Anis Mansour, translating clippings from London and editing a daily non-political page. Once, three days' work translating a House of Commons debate went straight into the wastebasket, and he left the room in tears. He learned that writing asks for patience and humility as much as talent.

1948 Joins the daily Al-AsasIn June 1949 the result came by telephone while he sat at his newspaper desk: he had graduated, with the grade ‘Good’. He went on to the preliminary year of a master's in political science under Dr Boutros Ghali. When the paper wanted to move him to the crime pages he refused, ‘because I see myself as a writer more than a journalist’, and set out to find his own road.

1949 Graduates in JuneThen came the first great blow. On 2 January 1950 his father died. The Orphans' Institute band, which the father had revived, led the funeral procession through Beni Suef, and he was buried in Shenra. His son was just three months past his twenty-first birthday. The uncles proposed that his mother and three sisters stay in the village. He refused, declaring that he alone would take full responsibility for them. He brought them to a rented flat in Cairo and lived to see his sisters graduate and marry. About ten years later he wrote a chapter about his father called ‘The Moment of a Lifetime’, and later a whole book. His father, he wrote, had bequeathed him ‘his mission and his profession’.

“I see myself as a ‘reader’ as much as a writer.”

1950 First broadcast, 19 DecemberA fellow postgraduate, the poet Saleh Gawdat, urged him to write for radio. He wrote a play about planting peace in children's hearts, far from toy guns. Baba Sharo, the broadcaster Mohamed Mahmoud Shaaban, sent it back with a verdict he never forgot: ‘This is a work about children, not for them. But this writer could write for children.’ He rewrote it about seven times. It went on air on 19 December 1950, with the author playing a small part ‘trembling with fear’, while his mother and sisters listened at a neighbour's house. Afterwards Baba Sharo told him, ‘Don't come into the studio as an actor again… I foresee a great future for you if you take your time. Are you patient?’ Decades later he answered that question in public, at a tribute to his old teacher, carrying a letter from the Arab children's broadcasters he had trained in Baghdad: ‘We all came out from under his cloak.’

1951 Supervisor of school radio, 7 AprilIn late 1950, when Taha Hussein was Minister of Education, he sat an examination for the post of supervisor of school-radio programmes. One examiner remarked, ‘It's a pity for someone this cultured to be a government clerk.’ He took up the post on 7 April 1951. He wanted school radio to be ‘a device of mental jolts and intellectual stimulus, not a tool of rote teaching’. He invented the inter-school quiz Top Students and recorded it in every governorate, and he taught geography through the journeys of travellers and history as drama. He cast young graduates of Zaki Tulaimat's drama institute, who went on to become stars. He later headed the Ministry's division of journalism, radio and television. A superior had summed him up on his first day: ‘He is excellent, but he is not cut out to be a civil servant.’

1978 Co-writes Iftah Ya SimsimHe worked with radio for sixty years, from 1950 to 2010, and wrote more than thirty thousand programmes. For children there were the morning stories read by ‘Amo Hassan’ and ‘Abla Fadila’, the series A Song and a Tale, thirty episodes on Saladin, a serial of The Scarecrow, The Wizard of Oz and more than a thousand episodes of the science programme Tek. For adults he wrote The World in Your Hands, which won a best-programme award; the Festival of the Arab Story on Sawt al-Arab; the book programme Read, which ran for seventeen years; and the prize-winning drama The Captive. From 1980 he wrote an annual Children's Day programme every November introducing a great writer for children from abroad, and from 1982 to 2010 a daily summer book quiz that drew young listeners from every governorate.

2010 Retires from radio, 1 JanuaryHe saw television for the first time after he turned thirty, and he knew at once that a craft built on words did not suit ‘the culture of the image’. Even so, in 1978 he spent two months in Kuwait helping to write the Arabic Sesame Street, Iftah Ya Simsim, broadcast from 1979, the International Year of the Child. Then he went back to words. On 1 January 2010 he retired from writing for radio, and he came out of retirement only once, in Ramadan 2013, to write a serial on values for a young presenter who had been blind from birth.

“And so I came to know Egypt more deeply and more widely: it is not Cairo alone.”

1954 Engaged on his birthdayDuring his postgraduate years he met Notaila Rashed, a first-year student in the Faculty of Arts. His birthday became the date for everything that mattered: they were engaged on 1 October 1954 and married on 1 October 1956, a few weeks before the Suez war. The same year Dar al-Hilal launched a new children's magazine, Samir. Notaila joined it as editorial secretary and rose to managing editor and then editor-in-chief. From 1966 she also edited Dar al-Hilal's children's books. It was he who suggested the name by which generations of Arab children came to know her, ‘Mama Loubna’, after their daughter. She won the State Prize for Children's Literature in 1978.

1956 Married, 1 OctoberWhen he was offered the editorship of the magazine Sindbad, and later a children's supplement to the magazine Hiya, he declined, so as not to compete with his wife's magazine. Between them they served children's literature under one roof, and the press called their home ‘the house of the Arab child’. It was lined so thickly with books that ‘not a wall was to be seen’. There their three children grew up: Loubna, who became a professor of English literature at Cairo University and translated several of his books; Hesham, who became an ambassador; and Essam, a writer. He gave them a chapter of their own, ‘All My Children’: ‘Loubna, an Egyptian shoot and daughter. Hesham, very much made in Egypt. Essam, self-made and bold.’

1966 Notaila heads Dar al-Hilal's children's booksHis mother lived with him in Cairo for twenty years after his father's death, keeping her country ways ‘as if she had left the village only yesterday’. Because she could not read, he once spoke to her on Mother's Day over the radio, in colloquial Arabic. His sisters told him she wept, and the message was broadcast five times that day. She died in 1971 and was buried in the village she came from.

1978 Mama Loubna wins the State PrizeWhen friends told him about colleagues who had put up whole apartment blocks, he replied, ‘I built three: Loubna, Hesham and Essam.’ Then came the grandchildren, who received from him ‘something beyond love’ and inspired more than a hundred of his radio stories. A children's writer, he believed, sees all the world's children as his own, and sees all the world's children in his own, however grown they are. Mama Loubna died before him, after a lifetime the two of them had given to the Arab child.

“I never had a life ‘of my own’; I was dissolved in the circle of my family.”

1962 His translation of Andersen's The Red ShoesFor about ten years radio swallowed him whole, until his old desk-mate Anis Mansour teased that a man without books had no right to call himself a writer. His first book, Hassan and Ihsan in the House of Ibn Luqman, a story of Shajar al-Durr and Louis IX, came out with the support of Dr Suhair al-Qalamawi. ‘My books began to appear slowly in the 1960s,’ he wrote: a translation of Andersen's The Red Shoes as a play in 1962, and in 1964 ‘The Moment of a Lifetime’, a chapter about his father, in the collection Why We Teach, published in English in New York the following year. In the same decade he joined the Egyptian Literary Society, a circle that met every Tuesday over chess and literature. Its members included Salah Abdel Sabour, Ezz El-Din Ismail, Abdel Qader al-Qitt and Farouk Khorshid, and he liked to point out that every one of them lived to win a State award.

1968 Founds the Society for Children's CultureHe also understood that one writer alone could not create a culture for children, and that a writer does not ‘live in a high tower’. In 1968 he founded the Society for Children's Culture and became its president. It worked out of a rooftop room at the Writers' House on Qasr al-Aini Street, on a budget of almost nothing. From that small room came Egypt's First Conference on Children's Culture in March 1970, and in the same year the Beirut seminar on the national culture of the Arab child, where he presented a paper on children's theatre. In 1969 he proposed Al-Firdaws, the first Islamic magazine for children, published as a supplement to Minbar al-Islam, and served as its editorial secretary.

1969 Al-Firdaws magazine for Muslim childrenAt Suhair al-Qalamawi's invitation he became the first member of the Children's Culture Committee of the Supreme Council for Arts and Letters, today the Supreme Council of Culture. The committee held its first symposium, on radio, television and the child, in 1971. He stayed on it as member and deputy rapporteur until his death in 2015, and was still attending its meetings in his last years. He was a founding member of the Egyptian Writers' Union in 1975, sat on its board for about twenty years and served three years as its secretary-general. He was also a board member of the Society for the Protection of the Arabic Language from its founding.

1970 First Conference on Children's Culture, MarchThese were the years in which he turned a passion into institutions: a society, a magazine, a conference, a committee. All of them made the same argument in different ways, that children's culture is not a luxury or a sideline but belongs at the heart of building a nation. Decades later he put it in one sentence in an interview: ‘We are raising them for a time that is not our own.’

“But on that day I felt I had won childhood its due from that symposium.”

1968 The Scarecrow is publishedThe Scarecrow grew out of his summers in Shenra and his farmer uncle's grievances. He drafted it in two weeks while working at children's summer camps in Alexandria. It appeared at the end of 1968 under its first title, Khayal al-Ma'ata, in Dar al-Hilal's children's books, illustrated by Abdel Halim El-Borgini. He had hesitated to publish it there, because his wife edited the series. Its characters were his relatives and friends from the village. His aim, he said, was for the village child to find himself in the book, and for the city child to meet him as a productive, creative human being. In 1970 the Ministry of Education set it for sixth-grade pupils. More than three million copies were printed, it became a thirty-episode radio serial, and the International Youth Library in Munich listed it among the best children's books. He regarded it as the first wholly original Arabic novel for children.

1969 The Life of Muhammad in Twenty Stories, BeirutThe second book was born out of a long hesitation. For about ten years he stayed away from religious subjects, afraid of making a doctrinal mistake. Then Abla Fadila asked him for a radio piece for the Prophet's birthday. Reading Haykal's Life of Muhammad, he stopped at ‘the Year of the Elephant’ and asked himself, ‘Why shouldn't the elephant itself tell the story of the birth?’ That question gave him a whole method. Each story would be told by a witness: Abraha's elephant, the donkey of Halima the wet-nurse, the she-camel of the Hijra, al-Buraq on the Night Journey.

1970 The Scarecrow set for sixth gradeThe Life of Muhammad in Twenty Stories was published in Beirut in 1969 by Dar El Shorouk, with a preface by the Minister of Religious Endowments, Abdel Aziz Kamel: ‘You have made a breakthrough in writing the Prophet's life for children.’ The Ministry of Education adopted it and about seven million copies were printed. In 2000 a new edition illustrated by Salah Bissar won the New Horizons award at the Bologna Children's Book Fair. It has been translated twice into English, and into Persian and Indonesian.

2000 New Horizons award, BolognaYet he refused to be boxed in as ‘an Islamic writer’. He wrote, he said, ‘from four belongings: faith and Islam, Egyptian patriotism, Arab nationhood, and humanity’. So The Crescent and the Cross, a book about Muslims and Christians living side by side, sits beside his stories of the prophets, and the small farmer of The Scarecrow sits beside Abraha's elephant. Both books became landmarks of Arab children's literature, and they share one secret: the story is told from inside the child's world, not from above it.

“I wanted the village child to find himself in my work, and the city child to come to know him as a productive, creative human being in his field, his crops and his life.”

1975 State Prize; UNESCO literacy honourIn 1975 he made the decision he had long wanted to make and devoted himself to writing for children. The state granted him full-time leave to write, and in 1985 he resigned from government service after some thirty-five years. His day became a farmer's day, as he told Al-Ahram Weekly: ‘Like any fallah, I wake up at four am, I work till nine.’ In the 1990s alone more than three hundred of his books appeared. He had learned his method from a family friend who got a fussy little girl to eat meat by mincing it into her vegetables: ‘Since that day I have minced the meat into the vegetables.’ Knowledge dissolved into story in The Unique Encounter, where Ibn al-Haytham meets Newton, in Our Beautiful Language, in Friends of Water, and in the Toshka series.

1976 My Father Was a TeacherThe same year brought his first great prize: the State Prize for Children's Literature, for A Tale from Every Arab Country, with the Order of Sciences and Arts, First Class. The prize meant, he said, ‘that the State pats me on the shoulder and tells me: you are on the right path; carry on. No more, no less!’ Also in 1975, UNESCO honoured his work for literacy, and Egypt's ambassador in Tehran accepted the award on his behalf. He thought of the mother who never learned to read and said, ‘My mother was behind a world prize.’

1981 First-ever State Prize for Children's CultureIn 1976 Dar al-Maaref published My Father Was a Teacher: The Struggle of a Nation and a Teacher, which he finished some twenty-five years after his father's death. Friends thought it his finest book, and his daughter Loubna translated it into English in 2014. More honours followed. In 1979 he received the Ministry of Education's Gold Order of Giving and the gold medal of the Arab States Broadcasting Union. In 1981 he became the first person ever to receive the State Prize for Children's Culture, with the Order of the Republic, and in 1990 came the award of the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO).

1991 King Faisal International PrizeIn 1991 he received the King Faisal International Prize for Arabic Literature, awarded that year for children's literature, which he shared with the Tunisian writer Ali al-Siqilli. The citation praised his leadership in spreading awareness of children's literature and organising its conferences, and his books that blend fantasy and reality and turn village and city life into stories carrying values. In 1992 the Armed Forces prize for October War literature went to his novel The Cubs of 6 October, and in 1998 he won first prize as best writer for children.

2000 Bologna; IBBY Honour ListIn 2000 international recognition reached its height. The Life of Muhammad in Twenty Stories won the New Horizons award at Bologna, and his Toshka series was placed on the Honour List of IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People, which honoured him at its congress in Cartagena, Colombia. Yet he said that every new book still brought him the joy of the first.

“It means that the State pats me on the shoulder and tells me: you are on the right path; carry on. No more, no less!”

1970 Delegation to England on children's cultureHis first journey abroad took him to Khartoum for a UNESCO course on radio and development. In 1970 he visited England with an Egyptian delegation studying children's culture in libraries, schools and bookshops, and from 1978 he was a regular at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In the 1980s he served UNESCO in Qatar as an expert on children's television and theatre and later on educational technology, and he trained children's broadcasters from across the Arab world in Baghdad for the Arab States Broadcasting Union. He advised the Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States, the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, the Children's Culture House in Baghdad and the Folklore Centre of the Arab Gulf States in Doha.

1980 UNESCO expert in QatarHe made some two hundred journeys abroad, more than a hundred of them within the Arab world. He visited the United States about ten times and Canada three times, lectured in Ohio in 1985, and carried Arab children's literature to China, the Philippines and most of Europe. In 1983, at the Library of Congress, the children's book specialists told him, as he recalled it, that he knew more about children's books than anyone they had met. In 2001 the Berlin International Literature Festival chose him as one of fourteen writers from around the world to tell stories to German children. From 2007 the Bibliotheca Alexandrina nominated him for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award three years running.

1983 Visit to the Library of CongressHe brought his stories to the world, and he brought the world to the Arab child. He introduced sixteen winners of the Hans Christian Andersen Award to Arab readers, among them Astrid Lindgren and Erich Kästner. He created the series Little Nobel and oversaw The Masterpieces, a series of forty-five world classics, for the General Egyptian Book Organization. When Lindgren died, he wrote her obituary in Al-Ahram. His translation of Andersen's account of the Prophet's birthday celebrations in Constantinople was placed on IBBY's Honour List for translation in 2012. Books of his own have been translated into English, Persian, Indonesian, Malay and Spanish.

2001 Berlin International Literature FestivalAt home he opened another window: a private library of children's books that visitors from IBBY and the Library of Congress counted among the largest in the world. He welcomed delegations there from China and elsewhere. In 1985 he was turned away from the children's section of the Rawda public library for being a grown-up, and out of that rebuff came the idea for a research centre for children's literature at Rawda. He chaired its scientific committee at the National Library for five years from 2000. For him the book remained, before the internet and after it, ‘the master of the tools of knowledge’.

“Translation is a trust.”

2015 Dies in Cairo, 28 SeptemberHe kept writing into his eighties: Grandpa and the Computer in 2007, The Literature of the Muslim Child in 2011, Great Are You, Egypt in 2012, and Tales of an Egyptian in America. In 2006 the Ministry of Culture published a tribute volume, Abdeltawab Youssef: Half a Century of Creativity in Children's Literature, and in 2009 Dr Maha Ghanem's bibliographic study counted more than a thousand titles to his name. He kept returning to his autobiography, My Heart, My Mind and My Pen, first published in Baghdad in 1990 and in an expanded edition in Riyadh in 2014. ‘I need not be a shining star to write my autobiography,’ he wrote in its opening pages.

2016 Memorial at the Supreme Council of CultureOn Monday 28 September 2015, Abdeltawab Youssef died quietly in Cairo, three days before his eighty-seventh birthday. Al-Ahram published his obituary on 1 October, his birthday, and called him ‘the dean of children's literature in Egypt and the Arab world’. He himself always turned down the title of ‘pioneer’, insisting that the pioneer was Kamel Kilani.

2017 Cairo University tribute, 15 JulyThe tributes came one after another. On 30 January 2016 the Children's Culture Committee of the Supreme Council of Culture, the committee whose first member he had been, held a memorial celebrating his life. On 15 July 2017 Cairo University, his own university, honoured him in the presence of the Minister of Culture, Helmy El-Namnam, and the university's president, Gaber Nassar, and launched the bilingual volume For the Love of Abdel-Tawab Youssef. In 2018 Beni Suef University marked ninety years since his birth, and in November 2019 a commemoration honoured ‘the one present though absent, pioneer of children's culture’. The National Organization for Urban Harmony placed a ‘Lived Here’ plaque on his home, as it did for Mama Loubna.

2021 Named first Personality of the Children's Book FairIn 2021 he was named the first-ever Personality of the Children's Book Fair in the history of the Cairo International Book Fair. At the fair's 53rd session in 2022 there were seminars on his writing, on his theatre and on him as translator and translated; a competition in his name drew children from nineteen governorates to tell stories, draw and summarise; and the General Egyptian Book Organization published his complete autobiography. The fair's Children's Wing celebrated him again in 2025.

2022 Honoured at the 53rd Book Fair with seminars and a competition in his nameAnd the library remained. From 2016 his family and a team of young researchers moved and catalogued it as the core of the Abdeltawab Youssef Center for Children's Culture. A Cairo University team took it as the model for The Digital Library of Arab Children's Culture for Sustainable Development, and found that his stories address all seventeen of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, decades before the UN adopted them. So the man who called himself ‘one of the people’ lives on: on the shelves of a library, in the memory of radio, and in the millions of children who grew up on his stories.

“I am one of the people, and that is enough.”