[1] Aslan was born in Tanta in the Nile delta in 1935, shortly before his family moved south to Cairo in EMbaba( poor city).
Aslan emerged on the Arab literary scene in the mid-1960s, and is considered to be part of the movement known as the Sixties Generation which also included such authors as Gamal Ghitany, Sonallah Ibrahim, and Abdel Hakim Qasem.
[3] The Heron was turned into an award-winning film (The Kit Kat, 1991) by leading Egyptian director Daoud Abdel Sayed.
[7] In the summer of 2000, Aslan and fellow writer Hamdi Abu Golail were subjected to a lawsuit by a maverick Islamist lawyer following a campaign of agitation by the newspaper Al-Shaab.
[8] In their capacity as editors of Afaq al-Kitaba (Horizons of Literature),[9] a series of modern Arabic classics published under the aegis of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, Aslan and Abu Golail had decided to reprint A Banquet for Seaweed, a controversial novel by the Syrian writer Haydar Haydar.