Born in 1931 in Galilee, he fled to Lebanon during the 1948 war. A year later he slipped across the border with his family and settled in Nazareth. The longtime owner of a souvenir shop, Ali is self-taught in contemporary literature and is a favorite reader at international literature festivals. Peter Cole has published two collections of poety and several translations from medieval and contemporary Hebrew. His Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (Princeton) received the MLA Translation Award.