To Cuddle My Exile

Adnan al-Sayegh was born in Al-Kufa, Iraq, in 1955. Today he is a renowned international award-winning poet.

At the age of 25, Adnan was forcibly conscripted into the Iraq army. Resistance meant execution. As a result, he faced injury and death on the battlefields of the 1980-1989 Iraq-Iran war. During this cataclysmic conflict, Adnan was detained for reading books forbidden by the Iraqi autocratic authorities. Along with other prisoners, he was confined in an abandoned stable, situated on the Iran-Iraq borders. This encampment was surrounded by hidden land mines and in danger of being obliterated by enemy bombing raids. All this compelled Adnan, albeit surreptitiously and by candlelight, to create poetry in which he fervently denounced the devastation of war and the horror of dictatorships.

On his release from confinement in 1986 the war had not abated, but the military seconded him because of his literary skills to work on a newspaper. Whilst there he continued to vehemently denounce the injustice and oppression of the ruling regime. In 1991 Durgham Hashem, the newspaper's editor, was killed on orders from Sadam Hussein. In 1993, when a section of Adnan's 500-page poem Uruk's Anthem - a poem which proclaims the profound despair of the Iraqi people - was adapted for the theatre and performed in Baghdad, rumours reached him that his life also was in danger. He fled to live in Jordan and once again worked as a journalist. His assistant editor was Nahed Hattar, who in October 2016 was assassinated in Jordan for publishing an incongruous caricature.

Whilst working in Jordan, on receipt of further threats, Adnan fled to Beirut. In 1996 the full-length Uruk's Anthem was published. This so enraged Sadam Hussein's son Uday that he condemned Adnan to death. To save his life, Adnan left Beirut and found refuge in Sweden, via the UN, in October 1996. Since 2004 he has been living in exile in London.

Adnan has used words as a weapon to decry the devastation of war and the barbarity of dictatorship. However, the 'power of his pen' has also given him poetic permission to 'overcome the power of their bullets', and reach beyond the political and religious extremism that has caused him so much anguish. This allowed him to embrace, with a lighter stroke of his pen, a poetic vision which encompasses the beauty and love in the natural world.

He has transported not only the reader but himself, from the darkness into light and from the sinister to smiles. Despite appalling difficulties Adnan upholds the courage of his convictions: that nations and mankind who have been divided through religious extremism, dictatorship and war, will one day be united by a bond of fellowship and freedom. A world filled with peace, where everyone will be free to walk forward into the light.

A full list of Adnan's awards are listed in this book. His poetry has been translated into many languages and he is frequently invited to take part in poetry festivals around the world.