Saad Hadi (Baghdad, 1956) is a writer and visual artist with a master’s degree in Art History from the College of Fine Arts, University of Baghdad.
He began his career as a journalist in 1975, working as editor, editor-in-chief, or correspondent at various news outlets such asFunon Weekly Magazine(arts magazine),andthe weekly Alef Baa,the Iraqi daily Al-Sabahand theLebanese Al-Akhbar, among many others in Iraq, Lebanon, and Damascus.
Saad Hadi’s first collection of short stories, Still Life (1990), was published by Al-Kharef Press in Baghdad.
In the early 2000’s, Hadi was appointed director of the Iraqi Cinema and Theater Association’s Cinema Forum and worked as professor of art history at the Iraqi Institute of Crafts and Folklore (2005-2006). Around that time, he put out the short story collection Ancestors Elsewhere (Cultural Affairs House, 2004) in his home city and the novels Layla and the Monkey(Ninawa, 2005) and Oriental Abstract (Ninawa, 2006) in Damascus. In 2009, he moved to Jyväskylä, Finland.
The London-based Moment Digibooks put out his more recent novels Lame Whore Birds (2013) and The Sultans of Ash(2014). Niwana put out his latest short story collection, Blackens(2019). As a visual artist, Saad Haadi has also participated in many art exhibitions. A sample of his watercolor and mixed-media portraits of writers such as Baudelaire, Kafka, and Tchekoff, is available on Instagram. Saad Hadi lives currently in Espoo and is completing a new novel.
Read A Maze, a short story of Saad Hadi translated into English, featured in the Baltic Humanoids series.
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