Abdul Rahman Munif

Munif was born in Amman to a Saudi father and an Iraqi mother, studied law and economics in Baghdad and Belgrade, and earned a doctorate in petroleum economics, expertise he later turned directly into fiction about the industry that transformed the Gulf. His political activity with pan-Arab nationalist movements got him stripped of his Saudi citizenship, and he spent much of his life in exile across Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, working for a time in the oil sector he would go on to indict.

Cities of Salt (1984), the first of a five-volume cycle, imagines a desert oasis destroyed when American prospectors arrive and a complicit Gulf ruler sells out the community that trusted him: collective narration without a single hero, tracking an entire society's upheaval. The novel was banned across much of the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, for its unflattering portrait of oil-age rulers and their American partners.

He continued writing fiction and political commentary from exile in Damascus, where he died in 2004.