Birth: NULL/NULL/1941 Death:NULL/NULL/2008
Born in Al-Barweh near Acre on 13 March 1941; wrote his first poems while in elementary school in the village of Deir Al-Asad; fled with his family to Lebanon during the 1948 War; returned to Palestine in 1949 only to find his village ruined and replaced by an Israeli settlement; became politically active through his poetry (his first collection appeared in 1964) and involvement in the Israeli Communist Party, Rakah, in 1961; worked as the editor of Rakah’s newspaper, Al-Ittihad (Unity) for some time; was repeatedly arrested by Israel and put under house arrest; went to Moscow in 1970 to study but left the university after one year and moved to Cairo where he worked for Al-Ahram newspaper; in 1972, moved to Beirut and began to work for the PLO as editor of Shu’un Filastiniyya (Palestinian Affairs Magazine); later was the editor of the Palestinian literary and cultural periodical Al-Karmel; became Director of the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut in 1975; head of The General Association of Palestinian Writers and Journalists; settled in Cyprus after the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon in 1982; became member of the PLO Exec. Committee in 1987 (from which he resigned in Aug. 1993 in opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PLO financial crisis); author of the text of the Declaration of Palestinian Independence (signed by the 19th PNC meeting in Algiers, 15 Nov. 1988); considered moderate in his political thinking and a trusted aide of Pres. Yasser Arafat; lived in Beirut and Paris until he returned to Palestine in 1995 after 24 years in exile and settled in Ramallah; one of nine PLO Exec. Committee members who signed a statement rejecting the Oslo II Agreement on 4 Oct. 1995; editor-in-chief of the literary review Al-Karmel, which resumed publication in Jan. 1997 out of the Sakakini Center in Ramallah; caused controversy in Israel in March 2000, when Israeli Minister of Education Yossi Sarid proposed to include him and other Palestinian poets on the Israeli high school reading list; published some 30 poetry and prose collections, which have been translated into 35 languages, and received several literature prizes, incl. the International Lotus Prize for Poetry (1969), the Ibn Sina Prize (1982), and the Lenin Peace Prize (1983); Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom (2001); a documentary was produced about him by French TV directed by noted Simone Bitton in 1997; author of The Music of Human Flesh, Selected Poems of Mahmoud Darwish (London: Heinemann, 1980), Sarir Al-Ghariba (Bed of the Stranger, 1998), The Adam of Two Edens (2000); The Raven’s Ink (2001); Stage of Siege (2002), and Unfortunately It Was Paradise (2003), among others; is a commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters and an honorary member of the Sakakini Center, Ramallah. He Died after undergoing open-heart surgery in houston, Texas on Wednesday 9th August 2008
