Collection: Taha Muhammad Ali

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the village of Saffuriyya, Galilee. At 17 he fled to Lebanon with his family after the village came under heavy bombardment during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. A year later they slipped back across the border and settled in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since. An autodidact, he owns a souvenir shop now run by his sons near Nazareth’s Church of the Annunciation. In Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Europe and in America, audiences have been powerfully moved by Taha Muhammad Ali’s poems of political complexity and humanity. He has published several collections of poetry and one volume of short stories. A biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, by Adina Hoffman, was published by Yale University Press in 2009.