Marwan Makhoul is a Palestinian poet, born in 1979 in the village of al-Buqei’a, Upper Galilee, to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. He works in engineering as a managing director of a construction company. He has several published works in poetry, prose and drama, including the poetry collections: Hunter of Daffodils, Land of the Sad Passiflora, Verses the Poems Forgot with Me, Where Is My Mom, and A Letter from the Last Man. For his first play, This Isn’t Noah’s Ark, Makhoul won the best playwright award at The Acre Theatre Festival in 2009. His poetry is also award winning and has appeared worldwide in Arabic publications. Several of his poems have been set to music. Selections from his poetry have been translated into English, Turkish, Italian, German, French, Hebrew, Irish, Serbian, Hindi, Polish, Dutch, Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Amharic, Eastern Armenian, Bangla, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Russian, and Urdu.
During the 2023 Gaza war, the following poem of his became a slogan raised by tens of millions of protestors and written on the walls of cities around the world: “in order for me to write poetry that isn’t / political, I must listen to the birds / and in order to hear the birds / the warplanes must be silent.” These lines became the world’s loudest call for an end to the targeting of civilians.

Image by Dar al saqi.