Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish was first married to Rana Kabbani, a writer, whom he later divorced. Later, in the mid-1980s, he married Hayat Heeni, an Egyptian translator. He had no children from either marriage.

He had a history of heart problems and suffered a cardiac arrest in 1984. He underwent two heart operations, in 1984 and 1998.

Mahmoud Darwish died on August 9, 2008, three days after yet another heart surgery in Houston, Texas. He was 67 years old. His body was buried at Ramallah's Palace of Culture.

Mahmoud Darwish was born on March 13, 1941, in the village of al-Birwa in the Western Galilee, to Salim, and his wife, Houreyyah Darwish. He was the second of the eight children of his parents.

In 1948, his family fled to Lebanon after Israeli forces assaulted his village of al-Birwa. A year later, the family returned to the Acre area, which was now part of Israel, and settled in Deir al-Asad.

He received his early education from a high school in Kafr Yasif, two kilometers north of Jadeidi, and later moved to Haifa.

At the age of 19, he published his first book of poetry, ‘Asafir bila ajniha’ or ‘Wingless Birds’. Initially, he published his poems in ‘Al Jadid’, the literary periodical of the Israeli Communist Party, later serving as its editor.

Mahmoud Darwish became an assistant editor of ‘Al Fajr’, a literary periodical published by the Israeli Workers Party. During the 1960s he was a member of Rakah, the Israeli communist party, and later joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut.

In 1970, he left Israel to study in the USSR. He studied at the University of Moscow for one year before moving to Egypt and Lebanon.

In 1971, he moved to Cairo where he worked for ‘al-Ahram’, a daily newspaper.

In 1973, he edited the monthly ‘Shu'un Filistiniyya’ in Beirut and worked as director in the Palestinian Research Center of the PLO. When he joined the PLO, he was banned from reentering Israel.

During the difficult times of the Lebanon War, he wrote political poems such as ‘Qasidat Bayrut’ (1982) and ‘Madih al-zill al'ali’ (1983).

In 1998, Mahmoud Darwish published his first collection of love poems titled ‘Sareer el Ghariba (Bed of the Stranger)’.

In 2000, Mahmoud Darwish published ‘Jidariyya’ (Mural), a book about his near death experience. It depicts his encounter with death following a heart surgery in 1998.