A prominent intellectual in Arab modernism, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was a prolific artist, writer and cultural critic of Palestinian origin but who spent many of his active years in Iraq. His surviving works from the 1940s offer a window into Palestinian life prior his own exile in 1948 and subsequent move to Baghdad. In 1948, Jabra received a Master’s degree in English Literature from Cambridge University in England, and took a teaching position at the University of Baghdad. His active participation in the 1950s with Jewad Selim and the Baghdad Modern Art Group, later led him to write a book on the artist that became a foundational work in modern Arab art history and criticism. He served as an official in publications for the Iraq Petroleum Company in Baghdad in from 1954 to 1977. In 1982, he co-wrote with Abdur Rahman Munif the novel ‘Ālam bi-lā kharā’iṭ (A World Without Maps). As a novelist and critic, his writing received widespread academic interest. In 2010, his home was destroyed in a car bomb attack which killed a number of his relatives, his personal library of hundreds of books as well as his collection of art that included works by Shakir Hassan Al Said and Mohammed Ghani Hikmat.