Najwan Darwish
نجوان درويش
1978–
Jerusalem
Jerusalem poet and editor whose flat, sardonic lines refuse consolation — 'one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets,' in the New York Review of Books' phrase.
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
Read more
Explore selected poems, essays, and biographical material on the linked source.
Explore Najwan DarwishConnected in the archive
10 connected records10 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
born in — 1 record
- Jerusalemالقدس
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: birthplace: "Jerusalem" → Jerusalem (Jerusalem Governorate)
written by them — 1 record
- Sleeping in Gaza
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "najwan-darwish" → Najwan Darwish
on a related subject — 8 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "Jerusalem".
- The Abu Khdeir familyأبو خضير
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "Jerusalem".
- The Al-Alami familyالعلمي
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "Jerusalem".
- The Ansari familyالأنصاري
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "Jerusalem".
- The Dajani familyالدجاني
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "Jerusalem".
- The Husayni familyالحسيني
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "Jerusalem".
- and 2 more
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Najwan Darwish.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poetry/najwan-darwish.- MLA
“Najwan Darwish.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poetry/najwan-darwish. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-najwan-darwish, title = {Najwan Darwish}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poetry/najwan-darwish}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }