Dareen Tatour
دارين طاطور
1982–
Reineh, near Nazareth
A poet from Reineh whose poem "Resist, My People, Resist Them" brought her three years of prison and house arrest — and made her case a global test of whether poetry itself can be put on trial.
Dareen Tatour was born in 1982 in Reineh, a Palestinian town near Nazareth, and writes poetry in Arabic. In October 2015 she posted a video of herself reading her poem “Resist, My People, Resist Them” (“Qawem Ya Sha’abi Qawemhum”); days later, Israeli police arrested her in a 3 a.m. raid, and she was charged with incitement to violence — the state’s case resting on a policeman’s disputed translation of her poem into Hebrew.
Tatour spent the next three years between prison and house arrest. Convicted in May 2018 and sentenced to five months in prison, she was released that September; in May 2019 the Nazareth District Court overturned her conviction for the poem, holding that it contained no unequivocal call to violence and that freedom of expression carries added weight when the expression is artistic. PEN International championed her case, and in 2019 she received the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award for Freedom of Expression.
Selected works
- “Resist, My People, Resist Them” (2015)
- “A Poet Behind Bars” (2016)
Sources
Read more
Explore selected poems, essays, and biographical material on the linked source.
Explore Dareen Tatour