While he does not have the visibility of his near contemporaries Edward Said or Mahmoud Darwish, in the last decade the poet Mourid Barghouti has joined the short list of Palestinian authors who are widely recognized among an Anglophone metropolitan readership. Barghouti has published a number of books in English translation, among them two collections of poetry and two memoirs, but it is his first work to be translated into English, Ra'aytu Rām Allāh (1997, Eng. / Saw Ramallah, 2000/3), that is chiefly responsible for his current prominence. Part memoir, part essay, and part prose poem, I Saw Ramallah (ISR, 2003a) is a poignant account of Barghouti's first return trip to Palestine after thirty years of enforced absence, a result of the Israeli conquest of the West Bank in 1967. Barghouti's account of his life outside of Palestine is interspersed with his impressions of the changes that have taken place in Ramallah and Deir Ghassanah, the neighbouring village where he spent his early childhood, creating a narrative that moves self-consciously between past and present in the pursuit of an accurate portrait of the hometown that the author is no longer legally allowed to call home.

The book was immediately and enthusiastically recognized by the Arabic literary establishment, winning Barghouti the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1997 and the Palestine Prize for Poetry in 2000. The book's subsequent publication in English by the American University in Cairo Press (2000) was also a significant literary event. Translated by the English-language Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif and with a foreword written by Edward Said, the English edition of / Saw Ramallah linked Barghouti with two of the best-known Arab writers in the English-speaking world and so established him as a writer of international standing.