So What

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the village of Saffuriyya, Galilee. At 17 he fled to Lebanon with his family after the village came under heavy bombardment during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. A year later they slipped back across the border and settled in Nazareth, where he lived until his death in 2011. An autodidact, he owned a souvenir shop now run by his sons near Nazareth’s Church of the Annunciation. In Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Europe and in America, audiences were powerfully moved by Taha Muhammad Ali’s poems of political complexity and humanity. He published several collections of poetry and one volume of short stories. His edition So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2007) was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Adina Hoffman's acclaimed biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century (Yale University Press, 2009), won the 2010 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.