It is therefore an important literary event to have these two talents contained within the same cover. Widely and enthusiastically received all over the Arab world when it appeared in 1997, the book went on to win the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, one of the most satisfying parts of which is this elegant and compelling English translation by Ahdaf Soueif, herself an important Egyptian novelist and critic whose own work (notably In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love) is in English. The political reasons for the separation are alluded to in I Saw Ramallah, as are the circumstances of his exile from the West Bank as well, of course, as his return thirty years later. It is by Mound Barghouti, a well-known poet who, as he says here and there in the book, is married to Radwa Ashour, the distinguished Egyptian academic and novelist the two were students of English literature together at Cairo University in the 1960s, and for a period of seventeen years during their marriage lived apart from each other, he as PLO representative in Budapest, she and their son Tamim in Cairo, where she is professor of English at Ain Shams University. This compact, intensely lyrical narrative of a return from protracted exile abroad to Ramallah on the West Bank in the summer of 1996 is one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we now have.
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