Mourid Barghouti

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

• Mourid Barghouti — Wikipedia
• Mourid Barghouti — ARC Publications