Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was born in Bethlehem, Palestine under the British mandate, to an Christian Orthodox family. He studied in Jerusalem, then at Cambridge before returning to Jerusalem where he was appointed professor of English literature. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, he went into exile and settled in Iraq, where he continued to teach English literature at university level, while actively participating in the country’s cultural life. In 1951, with other Iraqi artists, he founded the Baghdad Group for Modern Art. His work includes more than seventy works, between novels, poems, studies and translations. The Union of Arab writers counted him among the 100 best novelists of the 20th century. His novels have been translated into English and French, he also wrote two novels in English.