London

I STARTED reading the fiction of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz with a delay that embarrasses me, not until my early 30s. In the Turkey of my formative years, he was not well-known. His famous “Cairo Trilogy,” published in the 1950s, wasn’t widely available in Turkish until 2008.

We were far more interested in Russian literature  Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Chekhov and Tolstoy  and European literature  Balzac, Hugo, Maupassant and Dickens  than in Arab literature. Western classics had been widely translated into Turkish since the late 19th century. A number of them were even published as supplements in children’s magazines, and I remember devouring them eagerly.

Paris, London and Moscow seemed closer in spirit to Istanbul than Cairo was. We saw our own writing as part of European literature, even as our country waited and waited to become a full member of the European Union.

So Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winning author of dozens of novels, remained at the periphery of our vision  despite the strong historical, cultural and religious ties between Turkey and Egypt. There is a saying that “the Koran is revealed in Mecca, recited in Cairo and written in Istanbul.”