Palestinian poet and writer Mourid Barghouti was born on the 8Th of July 1944 in Deir Ghassana near Ramallah, Palestine, He has published 12 books of poetry, the last of which is Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight), Beirut, 2005. Spanish edition Medianoche published 2006 by UCLM and Fundacion Antonio Peres, Cuenca. His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997. 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 Random House, New York and Bloomsbury, London; He Visto Ramala, the Spanish translation, was published by Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterraneo. Barghouti participated in numerous conferences and poetry readings and festivals in almost all Arab countries and in several European cities. He lives in Cairo. Edward Said described I saw Ramallah as “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement we now have.” and John Berger wrote that I Saw Ramallah was “a bedside book if ever there was one, unforgettable memories, razor insights, stories with eyes closed, no conclusions, only the passionate pain of exile, recounted at the end of the day by a true poet
