Fawzi Karim obituary

My friend Fawzi Karim, who has died aged 73, was a major poet of the Arab world and beyond. His poetry has been widely translated; I met him while working on English versions of his work.

Plague Lands, his first book of poems in English, was published by Carcanet in 2011 and was a Poetry Book Society recommendation: an elegy for the life of a lost city, a chronicle of a journey into exile and an exploration of the history of a civilisation, it drew on his own experience of exile from his native Iraq.