Palestinian poet Darwish wins Moroccan award

The Moroccan House of Poetry is awarding its "Al-Arkana World Poetry Award" to the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish this year.

Darwish will receive the award at a ceremony and poetry reading in the Moroccan capital, Rabat on 24 October.

House of Poetry's Arkana Prize Committee said that the award, named for a tree that grows mainly in the Moroccan south, is given to a poet who "defends the values of diversity, freedom and peace."

"Darwish's experience includes different cultural periods that are wrapped by a deep knowledge of poetry and its geography, and a vital awareness that poetry is fated to be transformed and renewed which makes it always opened to the future," the committee said.

"Since the first moment of being a poet, Darwish was determined to look for pain and joy, life and death, roses and thorns between the parts and the whole in his poems," the committee added.