Nizar Qabbani

Born to a Damascene family of perfumers and confectioners, Qabbani served as a Syrian diplomat in Cairo, London, Beijing, and Madrid before resigning in 1966 to write full time. His debut collection Qalat li al-Samra' (The Brunette Said to Me, 1944) caused immediate scandal in Damascus for the directness with which a young man addressed a woman's body in print; his work continued to be controversial in conservative quarters for the next half-century.

Qabbani's love poems — Habibati, Qasa'id, Yawmiyyat Imra'a La-Mubaliya — were memorised, set to music by Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim Hafez, and Fairuz, and recited at weddings from Rabat to Riyadh. He simplified the diction of Arabic poetry without flattening it, and made everyday speech — the conversation of cafés, bedrooms, and souks — admissible to the high tradition.

After the Arab defeat of 1967 his work changed register sharply. Hawamish ‘ala Daftar al-Naksa (Footnotes on the Book of the Setback, 1967) is one of the most savage political poems in twentieth-century Arabic — an attack on the regimes, the rhetoric, and the religious culture that had produced the catastrophe. It cost him the favour of several Arab governments and made his books periodically banned across the region.

His private life was marked by recurring loss: his sister killed herself rather than marry a man chosen by the family; his second wife, the Iraqi schoolteacher Balqis al-Rawi, was killed in the 1981 bombing of the Iraqi embassy in Beirut. The long elegy Balqis made his grief into one of the most quoted poems in modern Arabic. He died in London in 1998 and is buried in Damascus.