[2][3] Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was born in Jaykur, a town south of Basra, the eldest child of a date grower and shepherd.

[5] He graduated from the Higher Teacher Training College of Baghdad in 1948[6] but was later dismissed from his teaching position for being a member of the Iraqi Communist Party.

He was actively involved in the 1952 Iraqi Intifada, in which he joined his fellow workers in sacking the offices of the US Information Service, climbed up an electricity pole and declaimed a revolutionary poem he had composed the previous night.

He decided to flee the country, obtained a false Iranian passport under the assumed name of Ali Artink, and escaped over the border to Iran.

However after the 14 July Revolution he wrote poetry critical of the new head of state Abd al-Karim Qasim, and was therefore dismissed from his post once again in April 1959.

By this time his political stance and rising literary fame had brought him to the attention of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which invited him to attend a conference entitled 'The Arab Writer and the Modern World’ in Rome.

On his return to Basra in September 1962 the Congress for Cultural Freedom provided ongoing financial assistance to him and arranged for him to go to London to seek medical advice.

[13][15] In February 1964 his already poor health took a sudden turn for the worse, and he was taken into the Basra Port Hospital with double pneumonia, heart problems and an ulcer.

[7] At the end of the 1940s he launched the free verse movement in Arabic poetry, with fellow Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala'ika, Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati and Shathel Taqa, giving it credibility with the many fine poems he published in the fifties.

In the realm of literary controversy, Sayyab stated that Nazik al-Malaikah's claim to have discovered free verse herself was false, and drew attention to the earlier work of Ali Ahmad Bakathir (1910–69) who had developed the two-hemistich format in the mid 1930s.