My father, Khalid Kishtainy, who has died aged 93, was a London-based, Iraqi-born writer, broadcaster and translator who was known across the Middle East for his satirical works. His column in a leading Arabic newspaper, Asharq Al-Awsat, ran for over 30 years, until he reached his 90s.
Khalid came to Britain in the early 1950s on an art scholarship. In the late 50s he joined the BBC Arabic Service and from the 1960s began pursuing a career as a writer and translator. In the 1970s and 80s he was an adviser to the Iraqi Cultural Centre in London. He wrote for many publications around the Middle East and published a variety of books in Arabic and English, including Arab Political Humour (1985), Verdict in Absentia: A Study of the Palestine Case as Represented to the Western World (1969) and Tales from Old Baghdad (1997).
Born in Baghdad, the son of Shakir Kishtainy, a schoolteacher, and his wife, Sabrya, Khalid studied law there. As a young man he was drawn to European culture, which would become a major influence on his future work. The plays of Bernard Shaw gave him a model for combining humour with social critique and out of this he developed the brand of Arabic writing, based on a plain, direct style of language, for which he would gain renown.
The political turmoil of Iraq and the Middle East was a theme throughout his life. He left Iraq for good following the 1958 revolution, which overthrew the monarchy and led to the creation of the Republic of Iraq. In London he became involved in anti-colonial and radical political causes, and wrote on the Palestinian question, advocating the use of non-violent methods of struggle. From the 1980s, the travails of Iraq prevented him travelling there and made it difficult to keep in contact with relatives as war forced many of them to migrate to safer countries.
Gregarious in nature, he gathered a circle of Arab artists, writers and musicians whom he would host at our family home in Wimbledon, south-west London, for evenings of discussion, music and poetry. He found time to paint despite pressing writing deadlines. Though his books and articles served a mainly Middle Eastern audience and heavily drew on his experience as an Arab, he was a passionate anglophile, devoted to 19th-century English literature and fond of England’s coastlines and countryside. He said that his love of rivers and lakes came from him being a true Mesopotamian, ever conscious of the Arabic verse about “water, greenery and a beautiful face”, and that his adopted homeland for him embodied these.
He is survived by his wife, Margaret Hitchcock, whom he married in 1972, and their two sons – me and my brother Adam; by his daughter, Jasmine, from an earlier marriage, and by his grandchildren, Isabella, Ivy, Iona, Sami and Juno.
