Mahmoud Saeed (Arabic: محمود سعيد; 1939 – 28 January 2025) was an Iraqi-born American novelist.

[1] Born in Mosul, Saeed wrote more than 20 novels and short story collections, and hundreds of articles.

Rue Ben Barka was published fifteen years later in Egypt 1985, Jordan 1992/1993, and Beirut in 1997.

His most important novels after Ben Barka Lane are The Girls of Jacob, The World Through the Angel's Eyes, I am the One Who Saw, and Trilogy of Chicago.

[2][3][4] Saddam City, published in 2004 by Dar Al-Saqi in London, is Saeed's most famous novel.

[2] Saddam City depicts the fear and despair of Baghdad schoolteacher Mustafa Ali Noman as he is shuttled from one prison to another after being detained by Iraqi security forces during the heights of Saddam Hussein's rule in the 1970s.

[6][7][8] The book has been received well by critics, one of which called Saeed's novel "... bracingly convincing ... a simply beautiful, though inevitably harrowing, tale.

"[9][10] Amazon.com also wrote that "Mahmoud Saeed's devastating novel evokes the works of Kafka, Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel.

It is a vivid account of the wanton and brutal treatment of the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein's feared secret police and of the arbitrariness of life under tyranny."

The novel has been applauded for highlighting positive aspects of Arab and Iraqi culture, including friendship, community, respect, generosity, and hospitality.

Saeed, who was a political prisoner three times over and whose work was often banned or destroyed, hid the early unpublished pages of this novel (along with remarkable others) in plastic bags in the tank of his toilet before fleeing Iraq with them.