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Portrait of Mourid Barghouti
Abutamim, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Source file on Wikimedia Commons for “Portrait of Mourid Barghouti”

Mourid Barghouti

مريد البرغوثي

1944–2021

Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah, Palestine

Poet of exile and return, Barghouti turned the absurdities and griefs of displacement into luminous, ironic prose and verse.

poetryexilememoirreturnI Saw Ramallah

Mourid Barghouti was born in 1944 in the village of Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah. In 1963 he left for Cairo to study English literature; he was sitting his final exams when Israel occupied the West Bank in June 1967, and he was barred from returning for thirty years. He lived in exile in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, and Hungary, and in 1977 was deported from Egypt, separated for years from his wife, the Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, and their son, the poet Tamim Barghouti.

His memoir I Saw Ramallah (1997), an account of his first return in 1996 across the bridge over the Jordan, won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and was translated into English by Ahdaf Soueif in 2000. In both his poems and his prose, Barghouti stripped the language of exile of grandiosity, finding in ordinary objects — a bridge, a photograph, a hotel room — the precise weight of what had been lost. He died in Amman on 14 February 2021.

Selected works

  • I Saw Ramallah (1997; English trans. Ahdaf Soueif, 2000)
  • Midnight and Other Poems (trans. Radwa Ashour, ARC Publications, 2008)
  • I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (trans. Humphrey Davies, 2011)

Sources

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Explore selected poems, essays, and biographical material on the linked source.

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  1. MidnightPoem
  2. Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud1913–1948
  3. Dareen Tatour1982–

Connected in the archive

13 connected records

13 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.

written by them — 1 record

  • MidnightPoems

    Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "mourid-barghouti" → Mourid Barghouti

named in this record — 2 records

One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.

  • I Saw RamallahLibrary

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: His memoir I Saw Ramallah (1997), an account of his first return in 1996 across the bridge over the Jordan, won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and was translated into English by Ahdaf Soueif in 2000.

  • Ramallahرام اللهPlacesRamallah and al-Bireh Governorate, central West Bank

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Mourid Barghouti was born in 1944 in the village of Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah.

names this person — 2 records

One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.

  • The Poets of ExileExhibitions

    Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: The man who crossed a bridge and found home had become a metaphor.

  • The Barghouti familyالبرغوثيFamilies

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: "The cluster of villages was dominated by the Barghouti clan," the Guardian wrote of the poet Mourid Barghouti's home country, "of politicians, poets and landowners."

on a related subject — 8 records

Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.

Cite this page

Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.

Chicago
“Mourid Barghouti.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poetry/mourid-barghouti.
MLA
“Mourid Barghouti.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poetry/mourid-barghouti. Accessed 22 August 2026.
BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-mourid-barghouti, title = {Mourid Barghouti}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poetry/mourid-barghouti}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }