Hilmi Salim

Hilmi Salem (Arabic:حلمي سالم) was an Egyptian poet. He was born in 1951 (in Menofia Governorate in Egypt) and died on 28 July 2012.

In the winter of 2007, he published a poem entitled "Leila Murad's Balcony" that had previously been published in his poetry collection entitled "Praising of weakness" in the Cairo art magazine "Ibdaa" headed by the poet Ahmed Abdel Moati Hegazy. However, at that time, the head of the Egyptian General Book Authority issued a decision to withdraw copies of the issue from the market when he saw that some of the poem's contents "offends the divine self." As a result, the Islamic Research Academy (one of Al-Azhar institutions) accused him of "atheism and blasemphy" and he was to be subjected to a campaign calling for his "repentance", after a statement of the matter was signed by about a hundred Islamic personalities, only to be criticized by Egyptian intellectuals, describing it as "an apostasy campaign and the culture of terror". In April 2008, the Egyptian Administrative Court issued a court ruling demanding the Ministry of Culture not to award the Excellence Award to the poet Hilmi Salem, on the grounds that he insulted the divine self.

He is considered one of the most prominent poets in Egypt in the 1970s. He obtained a BA in Journalism from the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, and he worked as a journalist for Al-Ahali newspaper published in Cairo, and the editor-in-chief of the Egyptian Cultural Intellectual and Literature Magazine. And the Editor-in-chief of the Rainbow Cultural Magazine. He is the recipient of the Excellence Award in Literature for the year 2006 for his entire literary work. Hilmi Salem was associated with the poetic group "Illumination", which was accompanied by "Aswat"/(voices), one of the most famous poetry factions in the seventies, and among its poets Hilmi Salem, Hassan Talab, Jamal Al-Qassas, Rifaat Salam, Amjad Rayan and Mahmoud Naseem.