Gaib Tuama Farman

Born in Baghdad in a poor family. Because of myopia, he was not accepted into the Baghdad Higher College for Teacher Education, which many leading Iraqi writers and poets graduated from. In 1947 - 1951 he was educated in Egypt , at the College of Arts of Cairo University , but was forced to return to Baghdad due to financial circumstances and poor health. There he studied at the College of Arts of Baghdad University , which he graduated in 1955 . He worked in several newspapers and publishing houses in Iraq and Egypt .

The first storybook was published in 1954 . He was friends with well-known contemporary writers such as Fuad al-Takarli and Abd al-Wahhab Bayati. He stands out among other Iraqi writers as a novelist who contributed most to the advancement of the Iraqi novel during the 20th century, both in the artistic development of the genre and in the full disclosure of the socio-political life of Iraq in the 1940s - 1970s.

After many risky conflicts with the state and censorship , in 1957 Farman was temporarily deprived of citizenship . In 1960 he left for Moscow , where he lived the rest of his life, working in exile until his death in April 1990 . During this period, he translated into Arabic the works of major Russian writers such as Gorky , Dostoevsky , Pushkin , Chekhov .

It is especially remarkable and perhaps unique in the Iraqi context that all of Farman’s novels were published when he was away from his homeland, living in the USSR (from 1960 to 1990). Some critics claim that so far none of the Iraqi prose writers has been compared with Farman in the brightness, detail and realism of the historical era depicted in his novels.

• December 16, 1967 G. T. Farman was awarded the USSR State Prize - the Order of the Badge of Honor .

• On September 22, 2017 , on the writer's birthday, a memorial bust of G.T. Farman was opened at the M.I. Rudomino All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature with the financial support of literary translators A. Khaba and Khairi Al-Damen.
• In 2018 , a memorial bust of G.T. Farman was opened in the Union of Writers of Iraq .

• About Ghaib Tu'ma Farman, short info: www.banipal.co.uk/contributors/367/ghaib-tuma-farman/
• "Ghaib Tu`ma Farman: The Old Man's Word" https://bandannie.com/2015/09/26/ghaib-tuma-farman-the-old-mans-word/
• "Many people who had been exiled by the Iraqi regime were living in Moscow ..." https://ruyafoundation.org/en/2017/01/4291/