The Mahmoud Darwish Museum is dedicated to Palestine's most celebrated poet, who lived in Ramallah during the last years of his life and is buried in the city. Darwish is widely considered the national poet of Palestine; his work, which moves between lyric beauty and political witness, has been translated into more than 22 languages.
The museum occupies a modern building designed to reflect the themes of displacement and return that run through Darwish's poetry. Permanent exhibits include manuscripts, notebooks, photographs, and recordings of him reading his own work. The archive traces his biography — born in Al-Birwa in 1941, a refugee after 1948, expelled from Israel, exiled in Beirut and Paris, returned to Ramallah in the 1990s, died in Houston in 2008. His tomb is in the museum gardens. The museum is a moving and well-designed introduction to Palestinian cultural life.