Ataya was one of six siblings born in what he calls 'one of the most beautiful and inspiring towns in Lebanon, Schweir, which is also known as Dhour-el-Chouer.'
Ataya started writing poems in Arabic at the age of thirteen. ANZAC soldiers had visited his hometown during the war, with whom he exchanged food supplies to feed his younger siblings, had his first smoke, and practiced his English: 'My school taught us English as a third language after Arabic and French - and I started to mix with the soldiers and learn a bit more.' This was not the first Ataya heard from this part of the world, as one of his father's sisters was a winemaker in Henderson, New Zealand.
The soldiers he met had encouraged him to travel to New Zealand as a student, which he did with the help of his aunt. At the age of sixteen, Ataya left Schweir, stopping on his way in Beirut, Haifa, Ismailia, Cairo, Mombasa, and South Africa. He spent a month on board a ship with some thousand other migrants.
Ataya stayed in Melbourne for a short time with family contacts, before moving to New Zealand, where he finished high-school and started writing poetry in English. At the age of twenty he moved to Walgett, in rural New South Wales, where he worked in a clothes shop run by his mother's cousin. Later on he started his own business hawking from one New South Wales town to another, camping 'on riverbanks amongst Indigenous people, sharing their dreams and listening to their awe-inspiring tales.'
In later years, Ataya moved to Sydney, where he ran a series of nightclubs and bars with friends. He returned to study and work in Lebanon, where he stayed for twenty-five years until the 1975 war broke out. He decided to move his family first to Canada, finally settling in Australia in 1987, where he has written and published two books of poetry. Two other books of his poetry, The Earth Woman (1976) and Blades of Time (1983) were published while Ataya lived overseas.
