Ezzedine Choukri Fishere (Arabic:عز الدين شكري فشير) (born 1966 in Kuwait City) is an Egyptian novelist, diplomat and academic.[1] He studied political science at Cairo University, and obtained postgraduate degrees from École Nationale d'Administration in Paris (1992), an MA from the University of Ottawa (1995), and a PhD in political science from Université de Montréal in 1998.
Fishere worked intermittently as an Egyptian diplomat, serving in the cabinet of Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1989, in the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel (1999-2001), and as a counselor to the Egyptian foreign minister (2005-07). He also worked as a political advisor to the United Nations Special Envoy to the Middle East (UNSCO) during the second Palestinian intifada (2001-04). He then joined the UN Advance Mission to Sudan (UNAMIS) and contributed to establishing the first UN peacekeeping mission in that country after the signing of the Naivasha peace agreement in 2005, known as UNMIS. During his year in Sudan, Fishere served as the UN's focal point for the Darfur negotiations in Addis Ababa, Ndjamena and Abuja. Fishere also served as the political advisor to the 2004 UN fact-finding mission to Lebanon investigating the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
During this period, Fishere quietly published his first two novels, The Killing of Fakhredine (1995) and Pharanoic Journeys (1999).[2] In 2007, he left diplomacy and assumed a more public role, focusing on his writing and on teaching. He published his third novel, Intensive Care Unit in 2008, which gained him considerable praise from the public and critics alike. The book was long-listed for the Arabic Booker Prize. His following novel Abu Omar Al-Masry was equally successful. Salah Fadl, a leading Egyptian critic, declared that "with these four novels, Fishere has entered the canon of Arabic literature."[3]
In parallel, Fishere has been teaching political science at the American University in Cairo since 2008.[4] He also writes frequently for the press, both in Arabic and in English. Recently, he was appointed by Egypt's transitional government as Secretary-General of Egypt's Supreme Council for Culture in April 2011. Fishere resigned four months later and returned to teaching and writing.
His fifth novel, Embrace by Brooklyn Bridge, was released in June 2011 and is long-listed for the Arabic Booker Prize (2012). It is described by critics as a novel about identity complexity [5]