Abdullah Essa

Abdulla Issa (Arabic: عبدالله عيسى, Russian Abedalla Iesa or Abdalla Isa; born 15 January 1964) is a Palestinian poet, First Secretary of the Embassy of the State of Palestine, journalist, political analyst, film producer, winner of several literary awards, and recognized as a national Palestinian poet. He is known as one of the representatives of "the poetry of updates". Abdulla was born in the Yarmouk Camp near Damascus in Syria. He is the oldest of the thirteen children of Mahmoud and Fauzia. His family is of Kurdish background and originates from the Sultan of Salah ad-Din Yusuf. His family was banished to Syria after the capture of his father's village Akrad, Palestine during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He began to study the Quran and classical Arabic poetry (in the camp there were only two books, the Quran and a collection of poems by Mahmoud Darwish). As a child he was greatly affected by a visit from Yasser Arafat in 1976 to the camp and later he devoted many of his verses to Arafat. After finishing secondary school in Damascus in 1982, he studied at the Economic Institute. During his studies he worked in the Department of Culture and Literature's Central Arabian magazine Freedom. In 1984 he became the laureate of the "New Arabian poetry", and at the age of 21 he published his first collection of poems in Arabic, the Last part. From 1985-1989 he was editor of the magazine New tomorrow, becoming a laureate of the prize of the Union of writers of the Arab countries in 1986. His father worked in the City Hall of Damascus and in 1987 was killed by Palestinians in the course of the inter-Palestinian political conflict. After the assassination of his father Abdullah became head of the family. In 1989 he moved to the Soviet Union where he began to study Russian at the preparatory courses at Moscow State University. In 1991 in Moscow he led the Palestinian Democratic Union under the direction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). From 1993 to 2003 he was the editor for cultural programs at TV and radio company "Voice of Russia". authoring programs about Russian and Arabian culture. In 1994 he was an editor of the literary magazine "Poets". In 1995 he graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute with the separation of "Poetry". In 2001 he defended his thesis at the Institute of Asian and African Countries on "Means of artistic expression of the Arabic 'New poetry': the Second Half of the 20th century".