Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was born into a Syriac Christian family in Bethlehem and studied English literature at the Arab College in Jerusalem, winning a scholarship to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and later Harvard University. Displaced during the 1948 Nakba, he settled in Baghdad, where he spent the rest of his life as a central figure in Iraqi cultural life.

Jabra was a renaissance man: an accomplished painter who co-founded the Baghdad Modern Art Group with Jawad Saleem, author of acclaimed novels like The Ship and In Search of Walid Masoud, and a pioneering literary critic who coined the term 'Tammuzi poets'. His definitive translations of Shakespeare's tragedies into Arabic are revered as supreme monuments of literary translation.