Salman Masalha was born in 1953, to a Druze family in Maghar, a village in the Galilee in northern Israel. He has a Ph.D. degree in Arabic literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a scholar of classical Arabic literature and a translator. He published five volumes of poetry in Arabic before producing a volume in Hebrew. His Hebrew collection 'Ehad mi-Kan' literally “one from here,” published in English under the title 'In place' in 2004. Salman is a frequent contributor to left-leaning Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.