Sameer Abdullah Sayegh

Sameer Sayegh is an Iraqi poet, journalist and translator. He was born in 1949 and holds a Bachelor degree from the faculty of Arts in English language and literature from Mustansiriya University, Baghdad, Iraq.

Sayegh worked as translator in the Air Force for one year at compulsory service, and as translator for the Iraqi Red Crescent, as a simultaneous interpreter for the head of the German Red Cross in Mosul, and for experts and lecturers from Switzerland, Germany, Norway, and Italy, in addition to the coverage of the Crescent's activities.

A poet and a translator, Sameer Sayegh has translated poetry from English to Arabic, published in various outlets, and has written and published a short story in English. He published his first poem The Virgin and the Horizon in 1972. In July 2013, one of his collections of poems, The Wanderer, was published in the UK. He is on the mayor encyclopedia of Iraqi poets.

He is a member of the writers, translators and journalists’ unions in Iraq. Some of his writings about literary subjects have been published in Thaqafat newspaper based in Baghdad. In 1991, Sayegh started working for the Al-Jumhuriya (The Republic) daily newspaper based in Baghdad, as its cultural correspondent in his native Mosul. Until recently, he worked for the international daily Azzaman, printed in London, Baghdad and Beirut.

Upon arrival in Ljubljana in February 2016, Sayegh said:

l was forced to leave my hometown,

so l walked away with nothing,

l continued walking aimlessly,

looking at the horizon,

telling my desperate soul

"You have had a home sheltering you,

and a life.

now all that is gone,

you are lost,

no home,

no safe haven to go to