The late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Mahmoud Darwish Foundation granted its Culture and Creativity Award for 2020 to American thinker Noam Chomsky, Moroccan poet and translator Abdullatif Al-Allabi, and Palestinian poet and researcher Zakaria Mohamed.
The Foundation’s Executive Board awarded the special honor award to the Lebanese poet Shawky Bisig.
The Foundation awards the award on the birthday of the great Palestinian poet on March 13, the National Culture Day.
The jury's statement stated that it had decided to award the award to Chomsky, "who is considered the father of modern linguistics and the holder of obstetric grammar."
She added that Chomsky "was famous for his courage and stubbornness in defending human freedom and dignity in the face of injustice and tyranny, in particular his position against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territory, and his principled progressive stances against tyranny and racism as an integral part of his general human mission."
On the authority of Abdel-Latif Al-Allabi, the jury chaired by Mohamed Barrada, which includes Riyadh Kamel, Moderation Othman, Al-Munsif Al-Wahaibi, Ibrahim Abu Hashhash, Elias Farkouh and Adela Al-Aydi, said in her statement that Al-Allabi’s path provides a “powerful image of the poet’s presence within his community, and poetry is an interlocutor of the other, And constantly questioning his self and his transformations in the midst of a world that lacks peace and brotherhood, as he was among the first to translate Mahmoud Darwish and others.
On the Palestinian Zakaria Muhammad, the committee affirmed that he is "one of the most prominent contemporary Arab poets, and has reached the poetic text, especially the prose poem, to new heights."
The Mahmoud Darwish Foundation said in a statement that its award is not limited to Palestinian creators since its inception, but also includes Arab and international creators "a bias towards Mahmoud Darwish's human thought and his insistence on generalizing the noble values of life in the face of racism, intolerance and the culture of tyranny."
The Foundation stated that it had awarded the “Special Honor Award to the Lebanese poet Shawky Buzayi, whose experience provides an innovative model that is unique and deep, in which the tight lyric construction based on pure rhythmic structure, the modern composition of the image and the open scenes on the issues of the present-day life.”
Darwish died on August 9, 2008, after complications from a heart surgery in Houston, in the United States. At that time, the Palestinian government decided to consider March 13, which corresponds to Dorish's birth, as a day of Palestinian culture.