Nabil Abu Hamad

is an painter, political cartoonist and caricaturist, with a weekly cartoon in Al-Hayat newspaper. He was born in the small Palestinian village of Kafr Yasif of a Lebanese father and Palestinian mother. After 1948 the whole family moved to Lebanon, where he studied law, literature and art, starting work on Lebanese newspapers as a cartoonist before becoming art director for 25 years for the weekly political magazine Al-Hawadeth.

When the magazine was forced to move from Beirut in 1977 during the civil war, he and his family moved with it to London, where they still live. He has exhibited his work at solo and group exhibitions in Beirut and London and studied drawing, printmaking and lithography at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art.

In 1988 he and his wife, Marie Sabia, founded the Argile Gallery, showing many international artists. A collection of his caricatures of well-known figures, Face Facts, was published by Cygnus, London.

Nabil Abu Hamad is also the author of two collections of short stories, and two novels – Al-Ateeli [The Cripple], excerpted in Banipal 29, Summer 2007, and to be published October 2007 by Banipal Books, and Beit min Al-Sharq [House from the East].