Nuha al-Radi was born in Baghdad in 1941, into a distinguished Iraqi family which included Mahmoud Shawkat, the last Prime Minister of the Ottoman Empire. In 1919, her father Mohammed Selim al-Radi was one of the first Iraqis to be educated in the USA: he studied agriculture in Texas. He married Suad Abbas, became an Iraqi diplomat and was appointed Ambassador to Iran in 1947 and then to India from 1949 to 1958 where Nuha al-Radi grew up. She was educated at private English-speaking schools in Delhi and Simla, except for a brief spell in 1956 when she attended a boarding school in Alexandria to improve her Arabic, but this was interrupted by the Suez Crisis.

In 1958, the Iraqi Revolution broke out. The monarchy was overthrown

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First published 10 February 2003

Citation: Shamsie, Muneeza. "Nuha al-Radi". The Literary Encyclopedia. 10 February 2003.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5215, accessed 21 November 2009.]