Shakir Noori is an Iraqi novelist, author, and cultural figure whose literary career spans more than three decades. He is the author of eleven acclaimed novels, including The Spider’s Window, Death’s Caprice, The Dogs of Gilgamesh, The Green Zone, Shaman, The Madmen of Boca, The Monk’s Hell, and Khatoon Baghdad, a work that earned him the Katara Prize for Arabic Novel in 2017, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the Arab world. His writing is widely recognized for its narrative depth, philosophical inquiry, and engagement with themes of exile, identity, power, and memory. In addition to his fiction, Noori has published numerous literary and cultural works and has been honored with major accolades such as the Ibn Battuta Prize for Travel Literature and the Arab Journalism Award, affirming his influence as a leading voice in contemporary Arabic literature.

Noori’s visual art emerges as a natural extension of his literary practice. The faces he paints carry the same narrative weight as his novels — fragmented identities, psychological tension, exile, desire, and the quiet violence of memory. Each portrait functions like a compressed story, a single moment pulled from a longer narrative, where expression replaces language and color becomes syntax. Through Wasted Faces, Noori translates decades of storytelling into visual form, allowing his characters to exist beyond the page and enter lived spaces, sound, and experience. The paintings do not illustrate his writing; they continue it — expanding his narrative universe into image, music, and collective memory.