Fawzi Karim is a well-known Iraqi poet, writer, and painter. Born in Baghdad in 1945, he was educated at Baghdad University before embarking on a career as a freelance writer. He has published more than twenty-three books of poetry and sixteen books of prose, and his poetry has been translated into many languages, including French, Sweden, Italian, and English. Plague Lands, his first book of poems in translation, was a Poetry Book Society recommendation for 2011.