YOU DON’T GET MANY writers like Alaa Al Aswany in the West any more — writers whose references are Chekhov and the nouveau roman rather than the latest sales figures and Richard and Judy’s current picks; writers who labour long and hard for no financial reward (and no hope of any).

In the Middle East you get nothing from the publisher on the advance front — and if a book sells 200 or so copies that’s excellent going. Few buy books, and no one builds a career on writing them. An imported book costs the weekly wage of a civil servant. Imagine a book costing £700 in Britain. The only books you see on the Cairo subway are medical books and the Koran.

Aswany (pictured below) is the author of the international hit The Yacoubian Building — the bestselling Arabic language novel for two years. We meet in a dental surgery in Cairo. He doesn’t have problems with his teeth — he’s a dentist. The father of two didn’t want to be a journalist or a screenwriter — the only two paying professions for writers in Egypt — so he needed a regular source of income.

Dentists have good hours and don’t travel — ideal for writing. But now that his books are finally making money — mainly from foreign sales in translation — he can slacken off on filling teeth.

Aswany, now in his mid- forties, has written two novels. His first took ten years. Now he assembles character files on his computer, building the details over time. When the characters come alive, they can be used in a novel.

“Details are very very important,” he says. His dedication to hunting for it extends to reading children’s comics and women’s make-up catalogues. “Searching for good details forces the writer to pay more attention and to care more about his characters.”

The Yacoubian Building is an ensemble piece set in the building of the title. Some of the characters are unattractive but Aswany “loved them all”. The reader too feels affection even for such rogues as the one legged “loyal” retainer who tries to diddle his boss.

The Yacoubian Building, due to be published in Britain in Feburary 2007 by Fourth Estate, paints a marvellous picture of modern Egypt with all its hypocrisies and fanatacism — the gulf between rich and poor reminiscent of Dickensian London. A film adaptation, to be shown at The Times bfi London Film Festival next month, captures this well.

Aswany is typically generous about the film (for which he earned only £1,500), describing it as “excellent”, even though he wasn’t invited to the premiere. He smiles: “I’m a security risk.” He is a well-known critic of the Egyptian Government and it was rumoured that ministers were embarrassed to meet him.

“The disease in Egypt is the dictatorship, the complications are fanaticism,” he says. “Treat the complications as if it were the disease and you will be in trouble — as we are.”

We circle the idea of writing for the people rather than for critics. “It is a terrible temptation to write for critics in the Arab world because the market is so tiny. I realised that it was so easy to be obscure and ‘clever’ and very hard to be lucid and truthful.” He is proud that his Italian publishers also put out Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. “They also write for the people,” he says, “not the critics.”

As for himself, he never comments on the quality of his work — that is for the reader. But like the late Naguib Mahfouz, Alaa Al Aswany is a world writer, making Egyptian concerns into human ones and beautifully illuminating our always extraordinary and sometimes sad and baffling world.

The Yacoubian Building will be shown on October 28 and October 30. Booking from September 29 (020-7928 3232; www.lff.org.uk

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