Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti was born in Ramallah, Palestine. He has published 12 books of poetry. His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997 and in Cairo 2013. A Small Sun, his first poetry book in English translation, was published by The Aldeburgh Poetry Trust, 2003. Midnight and Other Poems was published in UK by ARC publications 2008. He was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry (2000). His autobiographical narrative Ra'ytu Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah), 1997, published in several editions in Arabic, won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature (1997) and was translated into several languages; the English translation was published by the American University in Cairo Press as well as by Random House, New York and Bloomsbury, London. I Was Born There, I Was Born Here was published in Beirut 2009 and its English translation was published by Bloomsbury, London, New York. Barghouti participated in numerous conferences and poetry readings and festivals in almost all Arab countries and in several European and world cities. He was the chair of judges of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in the year 2015. He is the husband of the late Egyptian novelist, scholar and activist Radwa Ashour and has one son, Tamim Albarghouti who himself is a poet.
Tamim Al-Barghouti is Palestinian poet, columnist and political scientist. Al-Barghouti is known for the capacity of his poetry to draw the attention of hundreds of thousands of people. He is probably the most acclaimed arab poet of his generation. The reception of his poetry among a diverse audience from various backgrounds and age groups is a testimony to the vitality of the centuries-old tradition of classical Arabic poetry.
He is the son of Palestinian poet Mourid Al-Barghouti and Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, Al-Barghouti was immersed in the political realities of the Arab world, the way they affect the most personal aspects of an individual’s life, as well as in the literary means to express them. He has six poetry collections; Mijana, Ramallah in the Palestinian Spoke dialect (1999), Al-Manzar (2000), Qaluli Betheb Masr (2005), Maqam Iraq (2005), Fil Quds (2008) and Ya Masr Hanet (2012).
In 2007, Al-Barghouti’s work “In Jerusalem” became something of a street poem. Palestinian newspapers dubbed Al-Barghouti “The Poet of Jerusalem”. His posters hang on the streets of Jerusalem and other Palestinian cities, where keychains are sold with his picture on them. Sections of the poem have even become ring-tones blaring out from mobile phones across the Arab world, and children compete in memorizing and reciting it. The poem, which describes an aborted journey to the city, became the basis for a number of performances in Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, Amman, Beirut, Muscat, Berlin, The Hague, and Vienna, among others. "In Jerusalem" and other poems by Al-Barghouti have also had millions views of various TV Channels as well as on the internet, winning the poet an exceptional celebrity status in the Arab World.
On the 26th of January 2011, one day after the Egyptian Revolution that toppled President Hosny Mubarak, Al-Barghouti wrote the lyrical poem "Ya Masr Hanet"; its Arabic title roughly translates as "Oh Egypt, It's Close." With the internet down, he faxed the poem to a Cairo newspaper, copies of which were distributed in Tahrir Square. Then Al-Jazeera TV Channel asked him to record it. The video of his reading was projected in the Square every couple of hours on makeshift screens, helping to fuel the protests in real time.
Al-Barghouti has since been associated with political activism in Egypt and the Arab World as an opposition figure to the military regime that took over Egypt from February 2011 till June 2012, and then again from July 2013.
Al-Barghouti studied politics at Cairo University, The American University in Cairo, and Boston University, where he received his Ph.D. in Political Science. He has written two volumes of history and political thought: Benign Nationalism: Nation State Building Under Occupation, the Case of Egypt, published in Arabic by the Egyptian National Library in 2008, and The Umma and the Dawla: The Nation State and the Arab Middle East, published in London the same year. Al-Barghouti was a visiting professor of politics at Georgetown University in Washington DC from 2008 till 2011, a Consultant to the United Nations Economic and Social Committee for West Asia from 2011, where he currently works.
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