Skip to main content

Taha Muhammad Ali

Palestinian poet and short story writer Taha Muhammad Ali grew up in Saffuriya, Galilee. During the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, he moved with his family to Lebanon for a year; since then he has lived in Nazareth, where he owns a souvenir shop. Self-taught through his readings of classical Arabic literature, American fiction, and English poetry, Muhammad Ali started writing poems in the 1970s. In a direct, sometimes humorous, and often devastating style, Muhammad Ali combines the personal and political as he details both village life and the upheaval of conflict.