DARWISH, MAHMOUD

1941–, widely considered the Palestinian national poet, b. Barwa, Palestine (now in Israel). He was born to middle-class Sunni Muslim farmers, who were displaced when soldiers from the newly formed state of Israel occupied (and later destroyed) his village. A Communist, Darwish attended a Moscow university for a year (1970), and in 1972 settled in Beirut. There he became an editor for a Palestine Liberation Organization monthly journal and in 1975 director of the group's research center. When the PLO was expelled from Beirut (1982), Darwish settled in Cyprus and the following year he won the USSR's Stalin Peace Prize. Named to the PLO executive committee in 1987, he resigned in 1993 in opposition to the Oslo accords. In 1996 the poet settled in Ramallah in the West Bank. Written in Arabic, many of Darwish's lyrical yet searing verses evoke a lost and Edenic Palestine of the mind. In powerfully precise poetic language, he describes the longings of his people and the sorrows of dispossession and exile. Some of his poetry has been translated into English, including the volumes A Letter from Exile (1970), The Music of Human Flesh (1980), Sand (1986), Psalms (1994), and The Adam of Two Edens (2000).

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