Mourid Barghouti – författare

WINNER OF THE NAGUIB MAHFOUZ MEDAL FOR LITERATUREA fierce and moving work and an unparalleled rendering of the human aspects of the Palestinian predicament. Barred from his homeland after 1967’s Six-Day War, the poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile—shuttling among the world’s cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over the Jordan River into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the city of his youth. Sifting through memories of the old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters in this mere “idea of Palestine,” he discovers what it means to be deprived not only of a homeland but of “the habitual place and status of a person.” A tour de force of memory and reflection, lamentation and resilience, I Saw Ramallah is a deeply humane book, essential to any balanced understanding of today’s Middle East.

The sequel to the classic memoir I Saw Ramallah, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here takes up the story in 1998 when Barghouti returned to the Occupied Territories to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim, to his Palestinian family. Ranging freely back and forth in time between the 1990s and the present day, Barghouti weaves into his account of exile poignant evocations of Palestinian history and daily life - the pleasure of coffee arriving at just the right moment, the challenge of a car journey through the Occupied Territories, the meaning of home and the importance of being able to say, standing in a small village in Palestine, 'I was born here', rather than saying from exile, 'I was born there'. Full of life and humour in the face of death, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here is destined, like its predecessor, to become a classic.

In 1996 Barghouti went back to his Palestinian home for the first time since exile following the Six-Day War in 1967, first in Egypt and then in Hungary, and wrote a poignant and incisive account of the exile''s lot in the acclaimed memoir I Saw Ramallah. In 2003 he returned to Ramallah to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim Barghouti, to his Palestinian family. Ironically, within a year Tamim himself had been arrested for taking part in a demonstration against the impending Iraq War and found himself not only in the same Cairo prison from which his father had been expelled from Egypt when Tamim was a baby, but in the very same cell. I Was Born Here, I was Born There traces Barghouti''s own life in recent years and in the past - early life in Palestine, expulsion from Cairo, exile to Budapest, marriage to one of Egypt''s leading writers and critics (Radwa Ashour), the birth of his son, Tamim, and then the young man''s own expulsion from Cairo.Ranging freely back and forth in time Barghouti weaves into it his account poignant evocations of Palestinian history and daily life. His evocative composed prose beautifully rendered in Humphrey Davies'' precise and sensitive translation, leads to the surprisingly candid condemnation of the Palestinian authority''s leading figures and the astonishing verdict that ''The real disaster that the Palestinians are living through these days is that they''ve fallen under the control of a bunch of school kids with no teacher.'' Beautifully rendered by the prize-winning translator Humphrey Davies, I Was Born Here, I Was Born There, is destined, like its predecessor, to become a classic

Midnight and Other Poems is the first full-length poetry collection to be published in the UK by this remarkable Palestinian writer, previously known to English-language readers for his highly-acclaimed autobiography I Saw Ramallah (Bloomsbury, 2004). "Midnight and Other Poems is the most powerful and interesting collection I have read for a very long time."R.V. Bailey"Never mind that I speak not a word of Arabic. Mourid Barghouti's poetry shines through the translation. There are arresting images on almost every page."Raymond HumphreysMourid Barghouti has spent many years in exile, and his long poem 'Midnight' is a rich montage of images of the land of his birth and the strong emotional responses to which these images give rise. Here, anger, frustration and despair are juxtaposed with yearning and tenderness in Barghouti's powerful and evocative account of occupation, violence and oppression. The shorter poems which comprise the second half of the book are, by turns, dramatic and hard-hitting, contemplative and reflective, and together present an equally powerful and graphic picture of the poet's homeland.In Radwa Ashour's excellent translation, and with a helpful introduction by Guy Mannes-Abbott who recorded a number of conversations with the poet over a period of several weeks, this selection of Mourid Barghouti's poems marks an important addition to the body of Arabic literature available to English-language readers world-wide. Mourid Barghouti was born in July 1944 in Deir Ghassana near Ramallah, Palestine. He has published twelve books of poetry, the last of which is Muntasaf al-Layl / 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 in 2003. In 2000, he was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry. He lives in Cairo.About the translator:Radwa Ashour is an Egyptian writer and scholar, currently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Ain Shams University, Cairo. Well-known as a novelist and writer of short stories, she has also co-edited a major work on Arab Women's literature. As a translator, she has translated into English much of the poetry of Mourid Barghouti, to whom she has been married for many years. In 2007, Radwa Ashour was awarded the Constantine Cavafy International Prize for Literature. About the introducer:Guy Mannes-Abbott has written about writers and thinkers from across the world for The Independent, Guardian, New Statesman and other publications. He has written catalogue essays on contemporary Indian art, speculative essays about London and taught at the AA School of Architecture in London. He is the author of a series of widely published texts – poems, stories and aphorisms called e.things.