Of mixed Arab and Persian heritage, he studied in Basra and al-Kufah, first under the poet Walibah ibn al-Hubab, and later under Khalaf al-Ahmar.

[3][4] In his early childhood Abu Nuwas followed his mother to Basra in lower Iraq where he attended Qur’an school and became a Hafiz at a young age.

Waliba recognized in Abu Nuwas his talent as a poet and encouraged him toward this vocation, but was also attracted sexually to the young man and may have had erotic relations with him.

[8] He also participated in the well-established Arabic tradition of satirical poetry, which included duels between poets involving vicious exchanges of poetic lampoons and insults.

After his death we searched his house, and could only find one book-cover containing a quire of paper, in which was a collection of rare expressions and grammatical observations.

[12] Abu Nuwas draws on many philosophical ideas and imagery in his poetry that glorify the Persians and mock Arab classicism.

The poems were written to celebrate both the physical and metaphysical experience of drinking wine that did not conform to the norms of poetry in the Islamic world.

Abu Nuwas explores an intriguing prejudice: that homosexuality was imported to Abbasid Iraq from the province in which the revolution originated.

[11] This is shown through an excerpt from his al-Muharramah: "Boasting myriad colors when it spreads out in glass, silencing all tongues, Showing off her body, golden, like a peal on a tailor's strong, in the hand of a lithe young man who speaks beautifully in response to a lover's request, With a curl on each temple and a look in his eye that spells disaster.

Though many of his poems describe his affection for boys, relating the taste and pleasure of wine to women is a signature technique of Abu Nuwas.

[14] Abu Nuwas's preference was not uncommon among men of his time as homoerotic lyrics and poetry were popular among Muslim mystics.

[7] The earliest anthologies of his poetry and his biography were produced by:[15] He died during the Great Abbasid Civil War before al-Ma’mūn advanced from Khurāsān in either 199 or 200 AH (814–816 AD).

He was beaten by the Nawbakht for the satire falsely attributed to him; wine appears to have had a role in the flailing emotions of his final hours—this seems to be a combination of accounts one and two; 4.

[38] Nuwas is one of a number of writers credited with inventing the literary form of the mu‘ammā (literally "blinded" or "obscured"), a riddle which is solved "by combining the constituent letters of the word or name to be found".

A heavily fictionalised Abu Nuwas is the protagonist of the novels The Father of Locks (Dedalus Books, 2009)[51] and The Khalifah's Mirror (2012) by Andrew Killeen,[52] in which he is depicted as a spy working for Ja'far al-Barmaki.

"[54] The Tanzanian artist Godfrey Mwampembwa (Gado) created a Swahili comic book called Abunuwasi which was published in 1996.

[55] It features a trickster figure named Abunuwasi as the protagonist in three stories draw inspiration from East African folklore as well as the fictional Abu Nuwasi of One Thousand and One Nights.