NABLUS, West Bank, December 13 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - At the age of 86, well-known Palestinian poetess, Fadwa Tuqan, died in the West Bank town of Nablus, leaving behind a number of collections of poems and academic researches focusing on the Palestinian women role in resisting the Israeli occupation.

According to family sources, quoted by Agnce France-Presse (AFP), Tuqan died Friday night, December 12, in hospital, where she had been in a coma for several days following a stroke.

The Palestinian Authority and its leader, Yasser Arafat, paid condolences to the renowned poetess who was nicknamed as “Poetess of Palestine”.

Born in 1917 to one of Nablus' leading families, Tuqan, whose work has won several international prizes, knew Palestine under British rule, the creation of the state of Israel, the occupation and Palestinian autonomy, according to AFP.

The refined poet started her career writing about nature, love, loneliness, and sadness before turning to nationalist themes after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.

One of the rare feminine voices in Palestinian poetry, her works tell of the struggle of her people stripped of their land and liberty, describing the cruelty of the occupation.

"My story is about the struggle of a seed battling with the land, rocky and hard. It is the story of a fight against dryness and the rock," AFP quoted her as saying in her autobiography "Mountainous Journey".

Although she grew up in an environment favorable to artistic ferment - her brother, the poet Ibrahim Tuqan, introduced her to poetry - she suffered in her ultra-traditional family as an unwanted child, with a despotic father, a submissive mother and not allowed to go to school, according to AFP.

“In "Mountainous Journey", she tells a moving story of her childhood and adolescence enclosed by family rigidities and rules. The power of her vocation as a poet and the help of her brother enabled her to find personal freedom and ultimately express her solidarity with her torn people.

“In the second volume of her memoirs, Tuqan tells of her sufferings and hopes for lasting peace, and of her friends, Palestinian and Israeli, with testimonies of the understanding and support she received from them.”

"Self-portrait" and "Martyrs of the Intifada" are considered among the best of her poems.

"It would be enough for me to die in my country, to be buried, to dissolve and be annihilated," she wrote in one of her poems.