FACTBOX: Facts about Palestinian poet Darwish

(Reuters) - Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died after heart surgery in the United States, will be buried in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Tuesday in what could be the biggest funeral there since that of Yasser Arafat in 2004.

Following are facts about Darwish:

* Darwish, 67, won admirers in the Arab world and beyond for award-winning poetry and prose that was translated into more than 20 languages.

* He was born in al-Barweh village in the Galilee near the coastal city of Acre in 1941. Seven years later, Darwish was among that half of the Arab population of Palestine driven from their homes when Israel was created in 1948.

* He published his first poetry collection, Birds Without Wings, in 1960.

* Jailed several times by the Israelis for his political activities, Darwish left in 1971 for the Soviet Union. Exile in Cairo, Beirut, Tunis and Paris followed.

* In 1988, Israel's parliament debated a Darwish poem which Israelis saw as an attack on the Jewish state's existence -- though Darwish said it was a demand only for an end to their occupation of the West Bank, Arab East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip. "So leave our land. Our shore, our sea. Our wheat, our salt, our wound," he wrote.

* Darwish gave voice to Palestinian dreams of statehood, helping to forge a national identity. He crafted the 1988 Palestinian declaration of independence and wrote the late Yasser Arafat's words at the United Nations in 1974: "Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."

* Darwish joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation in its early days, but resigned in 1993 in protest over the Oslo interim peace accords that Arafat signed with Israel.

(Writing by Mohammed Assadi; Editing by Alistair Lyon)