Remembering Iraqi Novelist Mahmoud Saeed
FEBRUARY 4, 2025 — Prolific Iraqi novelist Mahmoud Saeed, who moved to Chicago in 1999 but continued to write about Iraq throughout his life, often boldly, died last week after a long illness. He was 89.
Born in Mosul in 1935, Saeed started publishing short stories in the 1950s, when he was in his twenties. He brought out his first novel, The Old Case, in 1963. And, starting with that first novel, Saeed faced a successive series of bans on publication that continued through the early 2000s. Although he left Iraq in 1991 and lived more than two decades in Chicago, he continued to focus much of his writing on his homeland. This sometimes, naturally, intersected with portraits of Americans, as in his powerful short story “Lizards’ Colony,” (tr. William Hutchins), which focuses on an interrogation by US soldiers.
In 2016, when news spread that the Mosul library had been attacked, as well as museums and bookshops, Saeed reflected on the Mosul of his childhood. The Mosul library, Saeed said over email in 2016, is what “made me a writer. It was located in the most beautiful place at that time, in the 40s and 50s, on the right bank of the Tigris, near the King Ghazi iron bridge. The building overlooked the river.”
In a 2012 email interview, Saeed explained that being a writer was also to prevent himself from becoming “a flunky”:
I do not know when I first began to write, but I couldn’t stop, and as life’s problems continued, writing novels became an outlet for my frustration. It helped me to overcome the pitfalls and obstacles of life, and prevented me from becoming a flunky — and that is what Iraqi governments wanted the people be, till now, the Iraqis are not free to live a normal life.
Several of Saeed’s novels have been translated to English, including his most well-known work, Saddam City (translated by Ahmad Sadri), The World Through the Eyes of Angels (edited by Rafah Abuinnab and translated by Samuel Salter and Zahra Jishi), A Portal in Space (translated by William Hutchins), Hunting Wild Duck (translated by Paul Roochnik), and Ben Barka Lane (translated by Kay Heikkinen).
In comments published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Heikkenen said, “Mahmoud Saeed was an Iraqi writer of great gifts, who persevered in testifying to the truth despite the daunting and sometimes cruel circumstances of his own life.”
Interviews with Saeed:
A 2011 talk with Fiction Writers Review, “The Humpbacked Minaret”
A 2012 talk with ArabLit, “Finding the Needle in the Haystack”
A 2013 talk with ArabLit, “There are Millions of Short Stories, But…”
In 2015, “Memories of Mosul’s Libraries”
Read work by Saeed in transtion:
An excerpt from Ben Barka Lane, tr. Heikkenen (World Literature Today)
An excerpt from The World Through the Eyes of Angels, tr. Abuinnab, Salter, Jishi (World Literature Today)
“Lizards’ Colony,” tr. Hutchins (World Literature Today)
“Love and the Demonstration,” tr. Hutchins (Brooklyn Rail)
Memories of Another Mosul, tr. Elisabeth Jaquette (New York Times)