Najwan Darwish

Najwan Darwish was born in Jerusalem on 8 December 1978 and has spent his working life there and in the Arab cultural press. He was editor-in-chief of the Palestinian magazine Min wa Ila, a cultural critic for the Beirut daily Al Akhbar from 2006 to 2012, and the founding editor of the cultural section of the London-based Al Araby Al Jadeed from 2014 — an editorial career that has run alongside the poetry rather than behind it.

The poems are short, plain, and frequently sardonic. They work by refusing the consolations available to a Palestinian poet: martyrdom, heroism, the redemptive homeland, the beautiful ruin. What is left is a voice that reports its own situation with something between exhaustion and contempt, and that treats Jerusalem’s overlapping religious inheritances — Christian, Muslim, Jewish — as material it is entitled to use without piety.

Nothing More to Lose, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and published by NYRB Poets in 2014, was his first book in English and was named one of the year’s best by NPR. Exhausted on the Cross followed from NYRB in 2021, Embrace from the Poetry Translation Centre in 2020, and No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems 2014–2024 from Yale University Press in 2024. Abu-Zeid’s claim for the work is that no Palestinian had written poetry quite like it before.

Selected works

• Nothing More to Lose (trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, NYRB Poets, 2014)
• Exhausted on the Cross (NYRB, 2021)
• No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems 2014–2024 (Yale University Press, 2024)

Sources

• Najwan Darwish — New York Review Books
• Four Poems by Najwan Darwish, trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid — Action Books