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Mahmoud Darwish is considered to be the most imortant Arab poet working today. He was born in 1942 in the village of Barweh in the Galilee, which was one of 450 Arab villages razed to the ground by the Israelis in 1948. (Destruction of Arab homes continues even now; link2 link3.) Darwish ran away at the age of seven to find himself in
Lebanon knowing nothing about his family. A year later, he went back to Palestine to find his village
totally ruined and an Israeli settlement in its place. Darwish wrote his first poetry when he was in elementary school. As a result of his political activism he faced house arrest and imprisonment. He left Israel in 1971, and lived in exile until his return in 1996 to Palestine. His poems are known throughout the Arab world, and several of them have been put to music. His poetry has gained great sophistication over the years, and has enjoyed international fame for a long time. He has published around 30 poetry and prose collections, which have been translated into 35 languages. He is the editor in chief of the prestigious literary review Al Karmel, which resumed publication in January 1997. He published in 1998 his new poetry collection: Sareer El Ghariba (Bed of the Stranger), his first collection of love poems.
In March, 2000, on the orders of Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid, of the left-wing Meretz party, Mahmoud Darwish's works were added to the curriculum of the public schools. The Darwish poems that Israeli youngsters will study are those concerning the time he spent in Israeli prisons. For more information about Mahmoud Darwish see: this link or this link
. For more of his poetry, click here.
