"I Saw Ramallah" Mourid Barghouti (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2005)
About the Writer:
Mourid Barghouti was born in 1944 in Deir Ghassana near Ramallah on the West Bank. Barghouti grew up in Ramallah as one of four brothers. In the mid-1960s, Barghouti went to study at Cairo University in Cairo, Egypt. He was just finishing his last year in college when the Six-Day War of 1967 started. By the end of the war, Israel had captured Gaza and the West Bank. Barghouti is one of around 6 million Palestinian refugees who were denied the right to go back to their homes in Palestine. After the war Barghouti first went to work as a teacher at the Industrial College in Kuwait. At the same time, he began to pursue his interest in literature and poetry, and his writings were soon published
In the autumn of 1977, Barghouti was deported from Egypt on the eve of Anwar Sadat’s controversial visit to Israel and was allowed to come back only after 17 years. Barghouti, his wife and their only son had to spend most of the next 17 years apart; Radwa lived in Cairo as a professor of English at Ain Shams University, and he lived in Budapest as a PLO representative in the World Federation of Democratic Youth and a cultural attache.
His autobiographical novel Ra’aytu Ram Allah (I Saw Ramallah) is a lyrical, moving story about the return of the Palestinian novelist Mourid Barghouti to Palestine after 30 years of displacement. Awarded the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1997, I Saw Ramallah is full of little joys and many questions about home, the changing realities and the troubling history of Palestine.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Title: "I Saw Ramallah"
Arab. title: "Ra'aytu Ram Allah " published by Dar Al Hilal (Cairo, 1997)
Author: Mourid Barghouti
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year: 2005
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
The text source "JoV´s Book Pyramid"
