Samir Naqqash Books

Samir Naqqash is an Iraqi novelist, short story writer, and playwright, born in Baghdad in 1938, emigrated to Israel and died in 2004. Samir Naqqash is the first of six children born to a wealthy Iraqi Jewish family. He attended school at the age of 4 and started writing at the age of 6.

In 1951, when he was 13 years old, he and his family immigrated to Israel, his father died in 1953 of a brain hemorrhage while his family was in the refugee camps in which Oriental Jews were placed coming to Israel, and this had a strong impact on him, which made him resolve to leave Israel.

He moved from 1958 to 1962 between Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, India, and the United Kingdom. And he faced great difficulties, which forced him to return to Israel, where he took various jobs.

In 1970, he joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, obtaining a BA in Arabic literature. He was well known in the Arab world and among the Iraqi community in Israel, but only one of his works was translated into Hebrew.

Naccache won an award from the Israeli Prime Minister for Arabic literature.

In 1990 he moved to London to settle there. Samir Naqqash died on July 7, 2004 at the age of 66, with pain within him due to his leaving Iraq, as he considered himself to have died when he was thirteen years old, as he saw that his real life was limited to those years he spent in Iraq and that which followed. It's just a shadow of those years.