Palestinian poet — by near-universal consent the national poet of Palestine and, in the judgment of many Arabic readers, the major Arabic-language poet of the second half of the 20th century. Darwish was born in the Galilean village of al-Birwa; his family fled during the 1948 war, returned illegally to find the village destroyed and replaced by Israeli settlements, and lived for years as "present-absentees" under Israeli military administration. He wrote his first published poem at twelve, for a ceremony marking the Israeli anniversary of independence, asking why the Jewish boy he was greeting was allowed to play on the beach while he was not.
The early poems of Leaves of Olives (1964) and A Lover from Palestine (1966), and above all "Identity Card" ("Write down! / I am an Arab") made him famous across the Arabic-reading world. He joined the Palestinian Communist Party, was repeatedly arrested and placed under house arrest, and in 1970 left Israel — first for Moscow, then Cairo, Beirut (where he edited the PLO journal Shuʼun Filastiniyya and lived through the 1982 Israeli siege, recorded in the astonishing prose memoir Memory for Forgetfulness), Tunis, Paris, and eventually Ramallah. He drafted the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence; he resigned from the PLO Executive Committee in 1993 in protest over the Oslo Accords, whose terms he believed would not produce the state they promised.
The later poetry turned from direct political witness toward a more meditative, formally ambitious voice — Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (1995), Mural (2000, written in response to his 1998 heart surgery), The Butterfly's Burden (2008), Almond Blossoms and Beyond (2008). His readings drew tens of thousands; his funeral in Ramallah was among the largest Palestinian gatherings since the death of Arafat. Edward Said, his friend and champion in English, did as much as anyone to bring him to Anglophone readers.