Over the course of his life, Nagui's artistic style varied, going from writing poems to writing novels. Yet, his works share the common theme of being about the human experience and connecting with nature.[1] Interestingly, his works sometimes took on a political undertone - one of his most well-known works, the 2008 novel El-Effendi (also transliterated as al-Affandi, or just "Effendi" in English), for example, was a "criticism of [a] middle class obsessed with chasing monetary and personal gain at the expense of the nation and society."[5] Yet, even with this story, Nagui resisted the temptation to produce purely political works, with one critic noting how: "On the surface, Mohamed Nagui's The Effendi looks like another one of those anger-laden books about the corruption eating contemporary Egypt from the inside out...[But] Nagui uses the by now cliched template of the Egyptian young man who snakes his way up using unethical short-cuts and sleight-of-hand, and turns it over its head by writing something closer to a modern fairytale."[6] In his works, Nagui shows a special affinity for the city of Alexandria, with one author noting how he and other "Proto-Modernists" like Mahmoud Said used Alexandria, "that most promiscuous of cities", as a model for what constitutes "Egyptianness".[7] To date, Nagui remains widely regarded as one of the most influential writers to have ever come from the pan-Arab region.