Iraqi Writer Sabiha Shubbar Dies in Morocco

AUGUST 8, 2024 — The Iraqi novelist and short-story writer Sabiha Shubbar died on Saturday, August 3, 2024 in Morocco.

She was 70.

Several news sources reported that she died of a stroke “out of grief over the separation from her husband, the poet Firas Abdel Majeed, who died last June 19.”

Born in Basra in 1954, Shubbar began her career writing in Iraqi newspapers in the 1960s, when she was still in school, and worked as a teacher between Kuwait and Iraq in the 1970s and early 1980s before leaving in 1986 for Morocco because of increasing repression. She wrote under the pseudonym Noura Mohammed until she left for Morocco in 1986.

She published her debut short-story collection, The Statue, with a Kuwaiti press in 1970 and other short story collections and novels followed.

She was particularly remembered by Moroccan writers: