Birth: NULL/NULL/1919 Death:NULL/NULL/1994
Born in Bethlehem in 1919 into a Palestinian Syrian-Orthodox family; was educated in Bethlehem and Jerusalem; in 1939 went to study at Exeter and Cambridge Universities, UK, graduating with a BA in English Literature in 1943; received an MA in Literary Criticism from Cambridge in 1948; worked as a teacher of English Literature and Director of the Arts Club in Jerusalem; after the events of 1948, settled in Iraq, where he taught at the University of Baghdad; established the Baghdad Group for Modern Art in 1948 (until 1952); wrote several books on literary criticism, prose poems, short stories, novels, as well as autobiographic works; also remembered for his translation skills (some 30 books from English into Arabic, incl. several of Shakespeare’s plays and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fur); received a number of awards for his achievements like the Thornton Wilder Award for Translation (Columbia University, 1991); his books include Hunters in a Narrow Street’ (English, 1960), The Ship (Arabic, 1970) In Search of Walid Masoud (Arabic, 1976), and The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood (Arabic,1989); died in Iraq in 1994.
