Modern Iraqi literature begins in the 1930s and 40s in a Baghdad that was, at the time, one of the great Arab cities — multiconfessional, polyglot, and culturally porous. The Iraqi free-verse revolution of the late 1940s, led by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Nazik al-Mala'ika, supplied modern Arabic poetry with its first truly new form in centuries.
After 1958 — the fall of the monarchy, the rise of the Ba'th, the Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Gulf War, the sanctions decade, the 2003 invasion, the sectarian war that followed — Iraqi literature has been a literature of catastrophe, much of it written from exile. Abdul Rahman Munif's Cities of Salt, Sinan Antoon's The Corpse Washer, Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, and Hassan Blasim's short stories are the major recent contributions.
The Iraqi diaspora — in London, Helsinki, Paris, Sydney, Dearborn — is now the demographic majority of working Iraqi writers, and the question of whether a literature can survive in the absence of its country has become, for Iraqi authors, a practical rather than a theoretical one.
