NEW

Midnight and Other Poems, ARC PUBLICATIONS, UK (20 Oct. 2008)

Mourid Barghouti writes on Mahmoud Darwish in The Guardian

'He is the son of all of you'

Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti was born on the  8Th of July 1944 in Deir Ghassana near Ramallah, Palestine, He has published 12 books of poetry, the last of which is Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight), Beirut, 2005. His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997.  A Small Sun, his first poetry book in English translation, was published by The Aldeburgh Poetry Trust, 2003. He was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry (2000). His poems are published in Arabic and international literary magazines. English translations of his poetry were published in Al Ahram Weekly, Banipal, Times Literary Supplement, Pen, and Modern Poetry in Translation. His autobiographical narrative Ra'ytu Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah), 1997, published in several editions in Arabic, won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature (1997) and was translated into several languages; the English translation was published by the American University in Cairo Press as well as by Random House, New York and Bloomsbury, London; Barghouti participated in numerous conferences and poetry readings and festivals in almost all Arab countries and in several European cities.  He lives in Cairo. Edward Said described I saw Ramallah as “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement we now have.” and  John Berger  wrote that I Saw Ramallah was “a bedside book if ever there was one, unforgettable memories, razor insights, name–games, stories with eyes closed, no conclusions, only the passionate pain of exile, recounted at the end of the day by a true poet.”

My Writing World:

"Life will not be simplified. Oversimplification is my enemy as a poet. In the last 50 years life in my part of the world has been a braid of the normal and the abnormal. People pursue their everyday life amidst historical extremities of war, emigration, oppression and uncertainty. In my work, I attempt to defy the conventional language by which this unconventional world is described; I try to see the astonishing in the usual, and the usual in the extreme; the main paradox of Palestine being that bombardment is less news than a family reunion! Formally too I am fascinated by this braid of the usual and the unusual, just as war and peace express themselves in the number of family members present at the breakfast table, I attempt to express the strangeness of my world in words that are not strange at all. I want my language to be physical, precise, visual, concrete, daily and normal, just to reveal how abnormal the condition it describes is. In doing this, I attempt to suggest a new language that defies the fake and flamboyant governmental grandeur, aimed at belittling complex reality by a flat two dimensional metaphor. No theory terrorizes me, life is richer than all our ways of writing it and a beautiful poem can turn all literary theories upside down".         

Mourid Barghouti,

(From a talk given in East Anglia University, 2005)

Mourid barghouti profiles:

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Wikipedia (English)

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Al-Ahram Weekly (English)

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al ahram ebdo (french)