Waguih Ghali (25 February 1927/1928/1929 – 5 January 1969) was an Egyptian writer, best known for his novel Beer in the Snooker Club (André Deutsch, 1964).
[2] He studied in the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University, and was present when the students staged a demonstration on 4 December 1948 that left the police chief, Selim Zaki, dead.
[4] However, personal narrative essays he published in The Guardian (Manchester) between 1957 and 1959 about life in exile suggest that Ghali was already living in Europe by that time.
The remaining essays, along with another piece also published in The Guardian in 1965, recount his experiences living in exile in Europe: “My Friend Kamal,” 5 Jun 1957; “Lessons for Mr. Luigi,” 21 Apr 1958; “Culture for Daimler,” 24 Nov 1958; “The Writers,” 29 Jan 1959; “An Indian Courier,” 16 March 1959; “Captains of My Ship,” 12 Nov 1959; “The Roses are Real,” 20 Feb 1965.
Ghali began composing the novel Beer in the Snooker Club while living in Stockholm and he completed it in West Germany.
[12] Beer in the Snooker Club is about a young Copt named Ram, who, like the author, has little money, but has benefited from a life of privilege.
A politically savvy novel set in the 1950s, the narrative critiques both the British colonial enterprise and the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Ram and his equally impoverished Coptic friend Font meet and befriend a Jewish communist from a wealthy family named Edna.
At the time, the two boys were students at the university and involved in demonstrations against the continued British presence in the Suez Canal Zone.
Ghali spent much of the period between 1964 and 1968 working for the British Army corps in the small town of Rheydt (Mönchengladbach), West Germany.
[15] Ahdaf Soueif wrote that “Waguih Ghali’s excellent novel Beer in the Snooker Club was published by André Deutsch in 1964.
And it creates an original and complex protagonist.”[18] Two years prior to the third reissue of Beer in the Snooker Club, in a letter to the editors of the London Review of Books, novelist Gabriel Josipovici wrote, “Beer in the Snooker Club is the best book ever written about Egypt (better even than my grandfather’s Goha le Simple)[23] and it is a crying shame that it is out of print.”[24] Each subsequent reissue generated additional positive reviews, attesting to the continued importance of the novel.
Helen Stuhr-Rommereim wrote that the novel's “themes echo a similar discourse that fills Cairo today.”[28] Negar Azimi also wrote that Beer in the Snooker Club “presents uncanny parallels to today’s Egypt, where artists, intellectuals and youth at large are beginning to fashion a new cultural republic of sorts even as they also struggle to find their bearings.”[29] Following the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, Ghali visited Israel as a freelance journalist.
[32] Ghali had already been denied renewal of his Egyptian passport, so he had little to lose politically by visiting the state with which his native country had recently been at war.