Madison Daily Leader · Madison, South Dakota · 26 October 2001

CP-2001-008

Mahmoud Darwish

The Associated Press, New York

Transcribed from the clipping

“NEW YORK (AP) — Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Columbia University professor Edward Said, an outspoken advocate for the Palestinian cause, have won awards from the Lannan Foundation. Darwish, who writes in Arabic, will receive the foundation’s $350,000 award for cultural freedom. Said, a prominent literary scholar and a former adviser to Yasser Arafat, will receive the foundation’s $200,000 literary award for lifetime achievement. The foundation, based in Santa Fe, N.M., announced the awards Thursday through David Lerner, a spokesman in New York. The award to Said is the first by the foundation for a work of nonfiction. The lifetime achievement award, which honors writers who have made significant contributions to English-language literature, is the largest monetary prize for literary achievement in the world after the Nobel Prize, which comes with a $900,000 award. Patrick Lannan, who heads the family-run foundation, said Darwish and Said were chosen long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Lannan Foundation describes itself as dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity. In a telephone interview, Lannan described Darwish as ‘arguably, the most prominent contemporary poet writing in Arabic in the world. We felt his poetry was important and deserved wider translation into English. We wanted to call attention to his social conscience.’ Said, an English professor, was honored because ‘he founded a theory for literary criticism and literary evaluation and there’s not a university professor in the Western world who doesn’t know his work,’ Lannan said. Said, who is an American citizen, sparked a controversy last year when he threw a rock toward an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border. Columbia University did not censure him, saying that the stone was directed at no one, no law was broken and that his actions were protected by principles of academic freedom.”

Context added by this archive

Six weeks after 11 September 2001, an American foundation gives its largest prizes to a Palestinian poet and a Palestinian professor, and the man who runs it tells a reporter they were chosen long before the attacks. Nobody asked him about a connection; the sentence is there because the connection is assumed. The archive also holds this poet’s photograph illustrating a review of this professor’s book fifteen years earlier.

Cite this item

"Mahmoud Darwish," Madison Daily Leader, 26 October 2001. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2001-008. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2001-008

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