This Iraqi poet, one of the most important contemporary Arab authors, belonged to the generation of the fifties and was the greatest example of what was known as “free verse,” alongside the poets Nazik al Malaika and Badr Shakir Al Sayyab.

Born in Baghdad in 1926, after graduating with a degree in Education at the University of Baghdad in 1950 (the same year in which he published his first book of poems “Angels and Devils”), Al Bayati worked as a professor and published the cultural magazine The New Culture. He left Iraq in 1954, forced by his political stance linked to communism and against the government, and he then lived in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. In 1958, with the regime change in Iraq, Al Bayati was hired by his country’s Ministry of Education and later held the position of cultural attaché at the Iraqi Embassies in Moscow (1959-1961) and Madrid (1980-1990). Between the positions he held, he lived in Cairo, Paris, London and Jeddah. His political position would always mark his relationship with the Iraqi authorities. In 1995, four years before his death, Saddam Hussein took his Iraqi citizenship away from him. He spent the final years of his life exiled in Damascus, where he died in August of 1999.

 

Al Bayati’s work clearly reflects the different stages which he went through in life, as well as the countries where he lived. Similarly, he has also frequently been described as an urban poet, being portrayed with the image of a participant in café literary talks and other such places in the cities where he resided.