Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Yousef Mahmoud Al-Khatib was born in the city of Dura in the Hebron Governorate on March 6, 1931. He studied primary school at Dura School, and secondary school at Hebron Schools, and obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Law from Damascus University in 1955. He worked in Jordanian Radio between 1955-1957, and worked in Syrian Radio until the beginning of the 1960s. He also worked in Cairo Radio, and in the Arabic section of Radio Netherlands Worldwide for two years. He was the Director General of the General Authority for Radio and Television in Syria between 1965-1966, and worked in other Arab radio stations such as Sawt Al-Arab, Al-Kuwaitiya, and Al-Iraqiya. He founded the Palestine House for Culture, Media, and Arts in 1967 and worked there until his death.
He joined the Baath Party in the early 1950s, and participated in establishing Palestine Radio from Damascus in 1965, and in establishing the Arab Writers Union in Syria in 1966. He became a member of the Palestinian National Council in 1968, and was a founding member of the Palestinian Writers and Journalists Union in 1972, and its deputy secretary-general.
He published his poems in Arab magazines, including the Beirut magazine Al-Adab. He has a number of printed poetry collections, including: Eyes Thirsty for Light (1955), Returnees (1959), and Oasis of Hell (1964), and a collection of short stories entitled Destructive Elements (1964), which was translated into English, French, and German, and a book entitled Diwan Al-Watan Al-Muhtaddin (1968), which includes a collection of poems by poets from the occupied interior. He also issued the Palestinian Memorandum, which documented Palestinian diaries between the years (1967-1976), and it was published in five languages: Arabic, English, French, Spanish, and German. He also has a literary scenario entitled The Massacre of Kafr Qasim (1971), and his first audio collection in the Arab world was published on four cassette tapes under the title Madman of Palestine in 1983. He also published two collections, the first entitled In Damascus My Family and Love Baghdad, and the second entitled I Saw God in Gaza, which were published in 1988.
His poem “The Thirsty Eyes for Light” won first prize in the Al-Adab magazine competition, which was organized at the Arab world level in 1955, and he received the Jerusalem Medal for Literature in 1991.
A number of studies and research papers have been published about him, including: Youssef Al-Khatib, His Life and Poetry (Master’s Thesis, 2002), Youssef Al-Khatib, Memory of the Earth... Memory of Fire (2004).
He died in Damascus on June 16, 2011.
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