Mahmoud Darwish
  • Gender:Male
  • ISNI:0000000121481892
  • Year of Birth:1941, Al-Birwa, Palestine, State of
  • Year of Death:2008, Houston - Texas, United States
Biography

Mahmoud Darwish born in 13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008 was a Palestinian poet and author who was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. He won numerous awards for his works. Darwish used Palestine as a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. He has been described as incarnating and reflecting "the tradition of the political poet in Islam, the man of action whose action is poetry." He also served as an editor for several literary magazines in Palestine.

Over his lifetime, Darwish published more than 30 volumes of poetry and eight books of prose. At one time or another, he was editor of the periodicals Al-Jadid, Al-Fajr, Shu'un Filistiniyya, and Al-Karmel.

By the age of seventeen, Darwish was writing poetry about the suffering of the refugees in the Nakba and the inevitability of their return, and had begun reciting his poems at poetry festivals. Seven years later, on 1 May 1965, when the young Darwish read his poem "Bitaqat huwiyya" ["Identity Card"] to a crowd in a Nazareth movie house, there was a tumultuous reaction. Within days the poem had spread throughout the country and the Arab world. Published in his second volume "Leaves of Olives" (Haifa, 1964), the six stanzas of the poem repeat the cry "Write down: I am an Arab." In the 1970s, "Darwish, as a Palestinian poet of the Resistance committed himself to the ... objective of nurturing the vision of defeat and disaster (after the June War of 1967), so much so that it would 'gnaw at the hearts' of the forthcoming generations." Darwish addressed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in Ward aqall [Fewer Roses] (1986) and "Sa-ya'ti barabira akharun" ("Other Barbarians Will Come").

Darwish's work has won numerous awards and been published in 20 languages. A central theme in Darwish's poetry is the concept of watan or homeland. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye wrote that Darwish "is the essential breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging..." Among his awards was the "Cultural Freedom Prize" by the United States Lannan Foundation, for the stated purpose of recognizing "people whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry, and expression."

Darwish's early writings are in the classical Arabic style. He wrote monorhymed poems adhering to the metrics of traditional Arabic poetry. In the 1970s he began to stray from these precepts and adopted a "free-verse" technique that did not abide strictly by classical poetic norms. The quasi-Romantic diction of his early works gave way to a more personal, flexible language, and the slogans and declarative language that characterized his early poetry were replaced by indirect and ostensibly apolitical statements, although politics was never far away.

Published works
  • Mural (Jidariyya), By (author), El Rayyes Books, 2001, ISBN-13, 9781855134966, Book
  • Almond Blossoms and Beyond (Ka-zahe El-lawz Aw Ab'ad)), By (author), El Rayyes Books, 2005, ISBN-13, 9789953213019, Book
  • Don't Apologize For What You Did (La Ta'tazer 'Amma Fa'alta), By (author), El Rayyes Books, 2003, Book
  • Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (Limatha Tarakt Al-hissan Wahidan?), By (author), El Rayyes Books, 2001, ISBN-13, 9781855132634, Book
  • State of Siege (Halat Hissar), By (author), El Rayyes Books, 2002, ISBN-13, 9789953210872, Book