"Fagih was himself born in Mizdah, in 1942. He emerged as a pioneering Libyan writer in the 1960s and ... his work often draws on his intimate knowledge of life in a rural setting and on the tradition of fable and folk tales. He is often inspired by the animal world; a recent example is his story 'Lobsters' which appears for the first time in Engish translation, by Maia Tabet, in the special feature on Libyan fiction in the latest issue of Banipal magazine of modern Arab literature. Fagih says the novel was inspired by his own experience in the late 1940s at the age of around six when he took part in an endeavour to dig into jerboa burrows of rats so as to retrieve wheat and barley kernels that the jerboas had hidden there. 'It is very telling of the hardships the Libyan people went through in those very difficult years,' Fagih says. He describes the novel as 'a tribute to my home town of Mizdah'".