Sunday Feature - I Come From There: The Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish

For many, Mahmoud Darwish was the poet laureate of the Arab world, until he died in August 2008. This programme tells the story of his life and work. Harriett Gilbert explores the poet who performed his work to crowds of 25,000 and who wrote speeches for Yasser Arafat. At six, after an Israeli attack on Darwish's village in Upper Galilee, his family became refugees in Lebanon, and from then on he lived throughout the Middle East, until his return to Ramallah in 1995. Inter-cut with poetry read by Samuel West, voices from Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Cairo and London discuss this "saviour of the Arab language". With Adhaf Soueif (novelist), Ruth Padel (poet), Sarah Maguire (translator), Raja Shehadeh (writer and human rights lawyer), Khaled Hroub (journalist and poet), Avirama Golan (writer) and Jeremy Bowen (BBC Middle East editor). Producer: Rebecca Stratford.