Winner of the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Medal, this fierce and moving work is 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.

"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). Mourid 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.