Mourid Barghouti (, Murīd al-Barghūthī; 8 July 1944 – 14 February 2021) was a Palestinian poet and writer.

Biography

Barghouti was born in Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah, on the West Bank, in 8 July 1944. He studied English literature at Cairo University, graduating in 1967, though he was exiled from Egypt in 1977. The Oslo Accords finally allowed Barghouti to return to the West Bank, and in 1996 he returned to Ramallah after 30 years of exile. This event inspired his autobiographical novel Ra'aytu Ram Allah (I Saw Ramallah), published by Dar Al Hilal (Cairo, 1997), which won him the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in the same year. A follow-up, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here was written when he and his son, Tamim, made a visit to the city. Mourid is also widely respected and known for his beautiful poetry, such as his long poem in Midnight and Other Poems, and has among other awards received the Palestine Award for Poetry, in 2020. In an interview with Maya Jaggi in The Guardian, Barghouti was quoted as saying: "I learn from trees. Just as many fruits drop before they're ripe, when I write a poem I treat it with healthy cruelty, deleting images to take care of the right ones." Barghouti was married to the novelist Radwa Ashour, with whom he had a son, the poet Tamim Barghouti. He died in Amman on 14 February 2021, aged 76.