Mourid Barghouti was born 1944 in Deir Ghassanah near Ramallah. He received the Palestine Award for Poetry in 2000, three years after his collected works were published in one volume. In 1966, he left Palestine to return to university in Cairo; it was thirty years before he was allowed to return home. I Saw Ramallah, his account of that homecoming, was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.