Mahmoud Saeed
Born: 1939 in Mosul, Iraq
Died: January 27, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois Pen Name: None Connection to Illinois: Saeed immigrated to Chicago in 1999. He taught intermediate and advanced Arabic language courses at DePaul University, as well as Arab Culture and Iraqi Political history. Biography: Mahmoud Saeed wrote more than twenty novels and short story collections, and hundreds of articles. While he wrote all maunscripts in Arabic, three of his most dynamic novels and memoirs have been translated into English along with several short stories. Mr. Saeed left Iraq in 1985, immigrating to the United Arab Emirates, after being arrested and imprisoned six times. From 1963 to 2008, Iraqi authorities banned the publication of his novels. After the 1991 Gulf War, Mr. Saeed returned to Iraq, only to flee again to Dubai. After moving to Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood, he became an American citizen. Mr. Saeed was an Arabic-language instructor and an author-in-residence at DePaul University, and he was a regular attendee at the monthly programs held by the Society of Midland Authors, of which he was a member. In 2014, the Chicago Literary Guild named him one of “25 Writers to Watch.”
Awards:
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Saeed
Selected Titles
 |
Saddam City ISBN: 0863563503 OCLC: 56366688 Saqi, London : 2004. One morning Mustafa Ali Noman, a teacher in Baghdad, is arrested as he reaches the school gates. For the next fifteen months he witnesses countless scenes of torture as he himself is brutally interrogated, shuffled from prison to prison and barred from contacting his family.The question of his guilt or innocence clearly irrelevant, Mustafa must fight to retain a grip on reality. ‘How do I know that I am not dreaming this?’ he asks.Mahmoud Saeed’s devastating novel evokes the works of Kafka, Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel in its account of wanton treatment by Saddam Hussein’s feared secret police. Narrated in a straightforward manner that makes it all the more vivid, Mustafa’s story testifies to the brutal arbitrariness of life under tyranny. |
 |
The World Through the Eyes of Angels ISBN: 0815609914 OCLC: 785782963 Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, N.Y. : 2011. Mosul, Iraq, in the 1940s is a teeming, multiethnic city where Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Jews, Aramaeans, Turkmens, Yazidis, and Syriacs mingle in the ancient souks and alleyways. In these crowded streets, among rich and poor, educated and illiterate, pious and unbelieving, a boy is growing up. Burdened with chores from an early age, and afflicted with an older brother who persecutes him with mindless sadism, the child finds happiness only in stolen moments with his beloved older sister and with friends in the streets. Closest to his heart are three girls, encountered by chance: a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew. After enriching the boy's life immensely, all three meet tragic fates, leaving a wound in his heart that will not heal. A richly textured portrayal of Iraqi society before the upheavals of the late twentieth century, Saeed's novel depicts a sensitive and loving child assailed by the cruelty of life. Sometimes defeated but never surrendering, he is sustained by his city and its people. |