Shukri Mabkhout

Shukri Mabkhout is a Tunisian novelist, academic, and university administrator born in 1962 in Tunis. He is a professor of Arabic linguistics and rhetoric and has served as president of Manouba University. His academic career and his fiction writing are intertwined: his deep knowledge of Arabic literary tradition informs the formal sophistication of his novels. Mabkhout published his debut novel Al-Talyanī (The Italian) in 2014, after decades of academic writing. The novel became an immediate sensation in the Arab world, winning the IPAF in 2015 and becoming one of the most widely discussed Arab novels of the decade. Set in Tunisia from the 1970s to the present, it follows a leftist intellectual across a life shaped by political disappointment, personal betrayal, and the seductions of ideology. The Italian was translated into English by Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza, and French by Yves Gonzalez-Quijano. The novel is considered a landmark of contemporary Arabic fiction for its psychological depth, its formal sophistication, and its unflinching engagement with the contradictions of the Arab left. Mabkhout is one of the most significant Tunisian literary figures and his debut remains one of the most celebrated Arab novels of the 21st century.