Mahmoud Darwish
(1941- )
Biography

was born in Al-Birwah near Akka in 1941. In 1948, the village was attacked by the Zionists and its people left to other places. 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 is in its place.
Darwish wrote his first poems when he was in the elementary
school in the village of Der Al-Asad.
He was detained by the Israelis and was put under house arrest
several times. He was denied having a higher education. However he managed to go to Moscow in 1970 from where he went to Cairo
in 1971. He was the head of The Palestinian Center for Research, editor of Shu'oon Falasteeniyyah (Palestinian Affairs Magazine), head of The General Association of Palestinian Writers and Journalists, editor of Al-Karmil
Magazine of the GAPWJ, and lately member of The Executive Committee of the PLO. He resigned from this position in 1993.

was born in 1941 in al-Barweh, Palestine,and grew up under Israeli occupation. He published his first collection of poetry in 1960 and hislatest,February2000, In 1981 he started the literary quarterly AlKarmel, which he still edits, now in Ramallah. In 1995, the English edition of hisbook (Memory for Forgetfulness), was published. A new French anthologyof his work ( La Terre nous est étroite) was published in March 2000 by Gailimard.