Haggag Hassan Oddoul (born Alexandria, Egypt, 1944) an ethnic Nubian author--who writes in Arabic--did construction work on the Aswan High Dam and has served in the Egyptian armed forces during two wars. He began writing at the age of forty and was awarded the Egyptian State Prize for Short Stories in 1990. An English translation of some of his stories by Anthony Calderbank has been published as Nights of Musk: Stories from Old Nubia (Cairo & New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005). In 2005, he won a major award from the Sawiris Foundation for the best Egyptian novel published between 2002 and 2004.