Badr Shakir al Sayyab

Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was an Iraqi author, poet, journalist, publisher, and political activist. He was born in Jaykur, a town south of Basra, the eldest child of a date grower and shepherd. He graduated from the Higher Teacher Training College of Baghdad in 1948 but was later dismissed from his teaching position for being a member of the Iraqi Communist Party. He worked in various jobs and participated in the 1952 Iraqi Intifada, a popular uprising against the monarchy. He fled the country in 1953 and lived in exile in Kuwait, where he worked for the Kuwait Electricity Company. He returned to Iraq in 1954 and severed his ties with the Communist Party. He was dismissed from his public service job again in 1959 for criticizing the new regime of Abd al-Karim Qasim. He became an outspoken anti-Communist and published a series of essays called 'I was a Communist'. He also wrote for the Beirut-based magazine Poetry, which was founded by the Syrian poet Adunis and the Lebanese poet Yusuf al-Khal. He visited Beirut in 1960 and won the first prize in a poetry competition for his collection The Rain Song, which was later considered one of his most influential works. He also translated many famous writers into Arabic, such as Oktay Rifat, Melih Cevdet Anday, Garcia Lorca, Yiannis Ritsos, Walt Whitman and Constantine Cavafy. He suffered from various illnesses, including tuberculosis, rheumatism, and heart disease. He died of a heart attack on his 38th birthday, December 24, 1964, in Kuwait. He was buried in Iraq and is regarded as one of the most important Arab poets of the twentieth century.