Mohammed Al-Asaad is a Pales­tin­ian poet, nov­el­ist and a lit­er­ary crit­ic. He was born in Umm al-Zinat, a Pales­tin­ian vil­lage on the south­ern slope of Mt. Carmel in 1944. On 15 May 1948, the vil­lage was attacked by a brigade of the pre-state Haganah Zion­ist fight­ing force. Umm al-Zinat’s peo­ple were expelled and the vil­lage was demol­ished, as was the fate of hun­dreds of oth­er Pales­tin­ian vil­lages and towns that were eth­ni­cal­ly cleansed dur­ing the estab­lish­ment of what came to be known as the state of Israel. Along with his fam­i­ly and the sur­viv­ing inhab­i­tants of Umm al-Zinat, the young Al-As‘ad was dis­placed to Jenin. In Jenin, the sta­tioned Iraqi army would trans­port the peo­ple of Umm al-Zinat to Iraq after its with­draw­al from Palestine.

Al-As‘ad and his fam­i­ly lived as refugees in Iraq. He began writ­ing poet­ry and lit­er­ary crit­i­cism dur­ing his time at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bagh­dad, where he com­plet­ed his high­er edu­ca­tion in 1967. Upon his grad­u­a­tion, Al-As‘ad moved to Kuwait where he con­tin­ued his pro­fes­sion­al life in the world of jour­nal­ism and publishing.

His first col­lec­tion of poet­ry Singing in Deep Vaults was pub­lished in Bagh­dad (1974) .He has pub­lished sev­en­teen col­lec­tions of poet­ry, includ­ing two vol­umes of col­lect­ed works which appeared in Cairo in 2009 and 2011. His first work of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism An Essay on Poet­ic Lan­guage was pub­lished in Beirut (1980). He is also the author of a fur­ther two works of art and lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, Pales­tin­ian Art (1985) and In Search of Moder­ni­ty (1986). His poet­ry and lit­er­ary crit­i­cism has in the last three-decades appeared in pres­ti­gious jour­nals like Al-Adab and al-Fikr al-‘Arabi al-Mu‘aser, among oth­ers, as well as in dai­ly news­pa­pers. His numer­ous stud­ies on ori­en­tal­ism and archae­ol­o­gy were col­lect­ed and pub­lished as Ori­en­tal­ists and Archae­ol­o­gy (Arab Sci­en­tif­ic Pub­lish­ers, 2010).

His first nov­el Chil­dren of the Dew was pub­lished in Lon­don (1990) and has since been trans­lat­ed into French, Por­tuguese, Greek and Hebrew. It was recent­ly repub­lished by Dar al-Feel in Jerusalem (2013). Six of his nov­els, includ­ing Chil­dren of the Dew, The Refugee’s Text (1999), The Lover’s Gar­den (2001), The Tree of Plea­sures (2004), Voic­es of Silence (2009) and Umm al-Zinat Under the Caroub Trees (2009), were pub­lished in two vol­umes of his col­lect­ed nov­els in Algiers (2009).

His rec­ol­lec­tions on his life as a refugee in the form of a dia­logue with the Egypt­ian-Israeli his­to­ri­an Joseph Algazy edit­ed by Françoise Ger­main-Robin was pub­lished as Par-delà les murs: Un réfugié pales­tinien et un Israélien revis­i­tent leur his­toire (Beyond the Walls: A Pales­tin­ian Refugee and an Israeli Revis­it Their His­to­ry) (Actes Sud, 2005).

He has also trans­lat­ed into Ara­bic Arthur Miller’s After the Fall (1998), Ken­neth Yasuda’s The Japan­ese Haiku (1999) and Ita­lo Calvino’s Six Mem­os for the Next Mil­len­ni­um (1999). 

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