was perhaps the most important contemporary Arab poet. He published his first book of poetry, Leaves of Olives, in 1964 when he was 22 and went on to publish more than 35 books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into 35 languages. His poems are known throughout the Arab world.
 
Darwish was born in 1942 in the village of Barweh in the Galilee, which was razed by the Israelis in 1948. As a result of his political activism in the support of his people he often faced house arrest and imprisonment. Darwish was the editor of Ittihad Newspaper before leaving in 1971 to study for a year in the USSR. He then went to Egypt where he worked in Cairo for al-Ahram Newspaper and to Lebanon where he was an editor of the journal Palestinian Issues and the director of the Palestinian Research Centre. Darwish was a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO and lived in exile between Beirut and Paris until his return in 1996 to Palestine.
 
He was the editor-in-chief and founder of the prestigious literary review al-Karmel, which he started in 1982 and which resumed publication in January 1997 out of the Sakakini Centre offices in Ramallah. In 1998 he published the collection Sareer el Ghariba (The Stranger’s Bed), his first collection of love poems, and in 2000 Jidariyya (Mural), a book consisting of one poem about his near death experience in 1997.
 
Muhamoud Darwish won the 2001 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, a prize which recognizes people whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry, and expression, and was awarded the Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France.