Zakaria Tamer, spelled Zakariya Tamir, is a Syrian short story writer.
15 Facts About Zakaria Tamer
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Zakaria Tamer is one of the most widely read and translated short story writers of modern Syrian literature, as well as one of the foremost authors of children's stories in Arabic.
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Zakaria Tamer worked as a freelance journalist, writing satirical columns in Arabic newspapers.
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Zakaria Tamer was born in 1931 in the Al-Basha district of Damascus.
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Zakaria Tamer was forced to leave school in 1944, at the age of thirteen in order to help provide for his family.
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Zakaria Tamer was apprenticed to a blacksmith as a locksmith in a factory in the Al-Basha district of Damascus.
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Zakaria Tamer read voraciously and was provoked by his reading, as he later said in an interview, "to create a voice which [he] hadn't been able to find [there]".
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Zakaria Tamer's intention was to represent in his writing the very poor majority of men and women in Syria, with their joyless and restricted existence.
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Zakaria Tamer began his literary career in 1957, when he published some stories in Syrian journals.
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Zakaria Tamer was instrumental in the establishment of the Syrian Writers Union in Syria 1968.
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Zakaria Tamer was elected member of the executive bureau responsible for the publishing and print, and was vice-president of the Union for four years.
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Zakaria Tamer wrote for various newspapers and periodicals published in London, including Al-Quds Al-Arabi.
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Those who rule, Zakaria Tamer tells us in many a story, while devoid of all the noble qualities that should be theirs, possess the intuitive awareness of how to use the carrot and the stick.
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The directness and absence of embroidery with which Zakaria Tamer writes is a powerful weapon in giving distinctive form to the basic themes to which he returns again and again.
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Until 2005, Zakaria Tamer has published eleven collections of stories, two collections of satirical articles and dozens of children's books.