Over the course of his literary career, Jabra wrote novels, short stories, poetry, criticism, and a screenplay.
[4] After his family moved to Jerusalem in 1932, he enrolled at the Rashidiya School and graduated in 1937 from the Government Arab College.
Jabra won a scholarship to study English at the University College of the South West in Exeter for the academic year 1939–1940, and stayed on in England to continue his studies at the University of Cambridge, because of the dangers of returning to Palestine by boat during World War II.
[5][6][7] In 1943, Jabra returned to Jerusalem, where he began teaching English at the Rashidiyya College as a stipulation of his British Council scholarship.
[9] In January 1948, Jabra and his family fled their home in Katamon in western Jerusalem shortly after the Semiramis Hotel bombing and moved to Baghdad.
[11] The same year, he received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, arranged personally by John Marshall, to study English literature and literary criticism at Harvard University.
[14] Following his return to Baghdad, Jabra worked in public relations for the Iraq Petroleum Company and then for the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information.
[15] Jabra's home on Princesses' Street in the Mansour District of Baghdad was a meeting place for Iraqi intellectuals.
[17] The One Dimension group was part of a broader movement among Arabic artists who rejected Western art forms and sought a new aesthetic, one that expressed their individual nationalism as well as their pan-Arab identity.
[7] As a poet, novelist, painter, translator and literary critic, Jabra was a versatile man of letters.