Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was a Palestinian-Iraqi writer, translator and artist. Born in Adana in 1919, he grew up in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, studying at the Government Arab College and winning a British Council scholarship to obtain an undergraduate degree in English literature at Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge. In 1948 he fled Jerusalem for Baghdad, where he found work teaching at institutions of higher education. He was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study literary criticism at Harvard University from 1952-1954, and upon his return to Iraq he occupied various official positions in industry and government. Over the course of his life he produced novels, stories, poems, essays, paintings and translations of French and English literature. He died in Baghdad in 1994.