Nizar Chakroun

Dr Nizar Mongi Chakroun is a Tunisian writer, critic, university professor, broadcaster and visual artist. His academic and cultural work has moved between literature, radio, television and the visual arts, linking local experience with the wider Arab cultural sphere.

His path into poetry began with a name. As a child, he encountered Nizar Qabbani before he fully understood the significance of sharing the poet’s first name. Qabbani’s work introduced him to poetry as a form of revolt in both language and life. Alongside Arabic verse, he read French poetry in its original language and followed the turns of Arab modernism from Nazik Al Malaika to Ounsi El Hajj and Adonis.

At six, he spent many evenings in the neighbouring studio of artist Nouri Damak, playing with paints and entering what felt like a dreamlike world until his mother called him home. At ten, he joined student theatre and became interested in amateur cinema, rarely allowing a week to pass without visiting the Baghdad or Municipal Theatre cinema halls. As a young man, he was due to act in the film “Al-Barwaita” (“The Cart”) through Hani Jawhari’s cinema club, but his parents asked him to postpone the plan. Instead, he began leading weekly film discussions at the Taher Chariaa Cinema Club. Growing up in a city devoted to film proved formative.

Writing became inseparable from everyday life. His father encouraged him to recite from the age of six and taught him to read the Qur’an aloud. Before turning to poetry, Nizar kept a diary in which he recorded each day’s happiness and sadness. That practice trained him to write and confirmed an early conviction: literature engages reality but transforms it through the aesthetic possibilities of prose and verse.

He grew up in a family committed to learning. His father read widely, while his mother’s fluency in French encouraged him to develop the language alongside Arabic. The father’s trade-union activity within the Tunisian General Labour Union also shaped his intellectual outlook. The organisation defended workers and employees while providing a home for progressive national thought.

Books and writing accompanied him through adolescence. He belonged to the local Al Fikr Club and, with others of his generation, founded the magazine “Ishaa”, where his first critical articles appeared. He was still at secondary school when he began presenting poetry evenings.

University gave his ideas a wider setting. In his first year, he published “Margins of Paradise” in 1990, a collection centred on human values. He studied Arabic literature while maintaining a commitment to comparative literature and other traditions. After qualifying as a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Sfax in 1994, he taught for several years before returning to postgraduate study in the visual arts in 1999. At the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Tunis, he completed an advanced research degree on Tunisian artist Adel Megdiche, followed by a doctorate on Iraqi artist Shakir Hassan Al Said. The doctoral work received the highest honours and its publication became an important reference on theory and criticism in modern Arab art. From 2001, he advanced through higher education and, after earning his habilitation, became a lecturer at the Higher Institute of Arts and Crafts in Sfax in 2015. He pioneered Arabic-language teaching of technical terminology at a time when most theory courses in Tunisia were delivered in French. He also taught the philosophy of music at the Higher Institute of Music in Sfax, joined its doctoral school, supervised master’s research and chaired the master’s committee. Until 2008, he oversaw cultural activity at the University of Sfax presidency as a cultural adviser. As a visiting professor at Kafr El Sheikh University in Egypt, he taught theoretical courses to master’s students in the Faculty of Specific Education.

From the beginning of his university career, he engaged actively with Tunisia’s cultural life. He joined the Tunisian Writers’ Union in the mid-1990s, assumed responsibilities in its Sfax branch and served in the Association for Literary Studies. He helped organise intellectual seminars and contributed papers on literary criticism. These experiences shaped his cultural outlook, made him an active participant in the cultural scene and strengthened his advocacy of modernity and enlightenment. His relationship with books also extended beyond reading and writing to publishing: he worked as an expert for Mohamed Ali Publishing House and broadened his knowledge through international training workshops in Sharjah and Britain.

His journalism began early. Drawn to progressive thought, he contributed to Al Mustaqbal, the newspaper of the Social Democratic Movement, while still at secondary school. At the start of university, he and friends founded “Fawateh”, the first magazine in the history of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Sfax. He later published philosophical essays in the weekly Shams Al Janoub and became its editor-in-chief after graduation, when it turned into a monthly. He also wrote for the daily Al Rai Al Aam. Believing strongly in cultural journalism, he joined the late Anwar Ashish and artist Raouf Al Karay in producing “Cultural Diary”, an innovative record of the cultural scene. Radio followed in 1994, when he became an external producer at Radio Sfax and created “Fingertip Touches”, Tunisia’s first specialised programme on visual art. By 2008, he had produced seventeen recorded and live programmes on subjects ranging from world fiction and poetry to cultural debates, intellectual seminars and interviews with leading Arab thinkers. After settling in Doha, he extended this work to television with “They Claimed That” on Doha 360, presenting wisdom through stories from “Kalila and Dimna”.

His interest in poetic criticism produced “The Ordeal of Poetry” in 2006, a diagnosis of contemporary Tunisian poetry and of the reception of classical verse. The book came to be read as a statement of poetic modernism.

For him, a poem is neither passing impulse nor ornament; it is a sustained search. He brings knowledge into the service of verse and treats poetry as a demanding craft, inseparable from existence, everyday conduct and lived experience.

His poetic career included major international festivals, notably Al Marbad Poetry Festival in Iraq in 1997. He also presented recitals combining poetry and music, including an evening with oud virtuoso Naseer Shamma and artist Mohammed Hassan Najmi.

Winning the Sharjah Prize for Arab Fine-Art Criticism helped establish him among the leading critics of Arab art. He contributed to the development of Arabic terminology for the visual arts and advocated “educating the eye” by spreading visual literacy among new generations.

He also turned to fiction without leaving poetry or art criticism. Drawing on several disciplines and art forms, he wrote novels of ideas that invite readers to think. “Daughter of Sidi Al Rais” (2010) was followed by “The Bell and the Minaret” (2018). “The Bull’s Blood: The Missing Chapter of Kalila and Dimna” (2019) proposed that Ibn al-Muqaffa’s work had lost a chapter and questioned the recording of Arab cultural history. His fourth novel, “Zoul Allah in the Narrative of the Brethren of Purity” (2022), examined the erosion of certainty, making inquiry the engine of knowledge and revisiting the Brethren of Purity through a narrative world in which an intellectual network suppresses knowledge while seeking humanity’s future salvation.

Balancing university teaching with literary and intellectual work was difficult even where academic research and creative practice overlapped. Moving among genres nevertheless enriched his experience and led him into translation. His first major Qatari cultural project was a 2012 translation of Guillaume de Lorris’s “The Romance of the Rose”. He later joined Qatar’s Ministry of Culture as a cultural adviser, became closely involved in the country’s cultural scene and helped formulate several projects.

He treats literature as an open horizon and approaches his intellectual and creative work accordingly. The writer’s central challenge, in his view, is to protect a coherent literary project amid academic, research and social obligations, while continually renewing its vision through experiment and major cultural questions.

In “In Search of Identity” (2018), he addressed Arab young people through a series of letters about the questions surrounding the formation of personal experience. He urged each generation to challenge inherited culture and understand the conditions of its own time. Identity, he argued, should not merely reproduce earlier models; it must create its own method while retaining the constants shared across Arab generations. The book was received as a forward-looking statement on the identity of the coming generation.

His contribution spans poetry, translation, art criticism and fiction. Several works became references for art students, generated academic research at Arab and Islamic universities and were translated into French, Persian and Turkish. He represented Tunisia at international scholarly and literary gatherings. Recognition included the 1993 National Poetry Prize, the Government of Sharjah’s 2008 Arab Award for Fine-Art Criticism and Tunisia’s 2023 Al Bashir Khareef Prize for the Novel, as well as honours from national and international forums and humanitarian organisations.