Last week Saudi Arabia banned the works of poet Mahmoud Darwish from the Riyadh Book Fair for being ‘blasphemous’. Darwish, who died in 2008, was perhaps the most important Arab poet of his generation. He was born in 1942 in the village of al-Birwa  to the north of what is now Israel.  During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, it was occupied by Israeli forces, its inhabitants forced to flee (many, like Darwish’s family, to nearby Lebanon), and the village itself destroyed the […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: mahmoud darwish, palestine, poetry