Leading poet Mourid Barghouti dies aged 77

Occupied Palestine (QNN)- Leading Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti died on Sunday 14 February at the age of 77. He was born in the village of Deir Ghassanah near Ramallah in 1944, even before the occupation state was created.

Barghouthi was known for being a strong advocate for the Palestinian cause and a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization but kept his distance from political parties. He spent much of his life in one form or other of exile – which he recounted in the memoir I Saw Ramallah that won him an international audience.

The memoir was described by his fellow Palestinian writer Edward Said as one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement.

Barghouthi was studying in Cairo when the 1967 war broke out between Arab countries and the occupation state. After the war, he couldn’t go back to Ramallah for 30 years.

In Cairo, he got married to Radwa Ashour, an Egyptian iconic novelist who translated many of his poems into English.