Khalid Shahin

Muzaffar Abdul-Majid Al-Nawab (Arabic: مظفر عبدالمجيد النواب) is an Iraqi poet and a politician.

Al Nawab was born in Baghdad, in 1934, where he completed his undergraduate studies from the University of Baghdad. As a youth from a poor family, he joined the Iraqi Communist Party and was tortured by the Hashemite Government. After the Iraqi revolution in 1958 which overthrew the monarchy, he was appointed as an inspector at the Ministry of Education. In 1963 he was forced to leave Iraq, after the intensification of competition between the nationalists and the communists who were exposed to prosecution and strict observation by the ruling regime. He was arrested and tortured by the Iranian secret police, before being repatriated to the Iraqi government. He was handed down a death sentence for one of his poems, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. He escaped prison by digging a tunnel and fled to the marshlands, where he joined a communist faction that sought to overthrow the government. Known for his powerful revolutionary poems and scathing invective against Arab dictators, he lived in exile in many countries, including Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Eritrea, where he stayed with the Eritrean rebels, before returning to Iraq in 2011. Before he returned to Iraq, he had been essentially stateless being able to travel only through Libyan travel documents. The first complete Arabic language edition of his works was published in London in 1996 by “Dar Qanbar”- Source Wikipedia