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Past Events
25 September 2024
6.30 to 8.00pm BST (UK time)
Zoom Bookclub Meeting
Mourid Barghouti was a prominent, celebrated, popular and well-loved Palestinian poet who lived most of his life, and died, in exile. Born in 1944 in Deir Ghassanein near Ramallah, four years before Israel came violently into existence, he studied English Literature at Cairo University and initially worked as a teacher in Kuwait and Egypt. He was a news anchor and political commentator at the Palestinian Radio in Cairo. In an interview in 2019 in London, actually on his birthday 8 July 2019, with Middle East Eye journalist Mustafa Abu Sneineh Mourid he recounted how during his life he had lived in 46 houses in three continents. He became a PLO representative in Budapest and started publishing his poems upon his return to Cairo in 1995.
6.30 to 8.00pm BST (UK time)
Zoom Bookclub Meeting
Banipal Book club invites you to join us to discuss
I Was Born There, I Was Born Here
by Mourid Barghouti
Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies
In I Was Born There, I Was Born Here Mourid Barghouti explains to his son – and to the world – the life decisions he has made, illuminating the path of exile across generations. Ranging freely back and forth in time between the 1990s and the present, Barghouti poignantly recalls Palestinian history and daily life while expressing the meaning of home and the importance of being able to say, standing in a small village in Palestine, "I was born here," rather than saying from exile, "I was born there."
His elegant and expressive prose, beautifully rendered in Humphrey Davies' sensitive translation, is full of life and humour in the face of a culture of death.
His elegant and expressive prose, beautifully rendered in Humphrey Davies' sensitive translation, is full of life and humour in the face of a culture of death.
MOURID BARGHOUTI (1944–2021)
Mourid Barghouti was a prominent, celebrated, popular and well-loved Palestinian poet who lived most of his life, and died, in exile. Born in 1944 in Deir Ghassanein near Ramallah, four years before Israel came violently into existence, he studied English Literature at Cairo University and initially worked as a teacher in Kuwait and Egypt. He was a news anchor and political commentator at the Palestinian Radio in Cairo. In an interview in 2019 in London, actually on his birthday 8 July 2019, with Middle East Eye journalist Mustafa Abu Sneineh Mourid he recounted how during his life he had lived in 46 houses in three continents. He became a PLO representative in Budapest and started publishing his poems upon his return to Cairo in 1995.
His collected works were published in Beirut in 1997, and in the same year his memoir of that first visit home after thirty years, Ra'aytu Ram Allah, won the 1997 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. A best-seller in the Arab world, I Saw Ramallah, translated into English by Ahdaf Soueif, was published by Bloomsbury in the UK in 2004 to critical acclaim.
A fuller biography can be found on this Banipal page:
https://www.banipal.co.uk/contributors/306/mourid-barghouti-1944%E2%80%932021/
https://www.banipal.co.uk/contributors/306/mourid-barghouti-1944%E2%80%932021/
And also, this Banipal news item about learning of his death on 14 February 2021:
Some poems by Mourid Barghouti are available to read on the following link. They were first published in Banipal 15/16 (Autumn 2002-Spring 2003), the print issue out of print for many years, in translation from the Arabic by the late Radwa Ashour, Mourid's wife.
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ALL WELCOME
Please email bookclub@banipal.co.uk to request the Zoom Login.
If you like, do also use Facebook Messenger to tell us you'd like to join the discussion.
The Book Club Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/BanipalBookClub/
The Zoom Login will be emailed on Monday 23 September 2024
to everyone who has emailed/messaged to attend
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Banipal Book Club
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