AMAL DONQOL, author of some of the most appreciated modern poems of the insurgent 1960s, is at the centre of a four-day Supreme Council of Culture conference beginning next Sunday to mark the 20th anniversary of his death.

A multi-Arab event, the conference features such well-known figures as poets Mahmoud Darwish and Qasem Haddad, and writers Abbas Baydoub and Seif Al-Rahbi.

The conference's seminars, poetry recitals and testimonies will be accompanied by an exhibition of calligraphy by Hamed El-Uweidi, who has used some of Donqol's lines, and three portraits of the poet by Gouda Khalifa, Bahgat and Salah Enani.

Iraqi composer Nasir Shamma will also perform Donqol's early poem, Al-Malha Al-Saghir (The Small Night Club), which he recently set to music.

To accompany the event the council has produced a video of Ateyat El-Abnoudi's Awraq Al-Ghurfa Thamaniya (Room No. 8 Papers), a documentary named after the poet's posthumous collection, written in hospital in the months preceding his death. The council will also make available a new edition of Donqol's complete works, the first to include his early, previously uncollected poems, as well as five new books on aspects of his life and work.