Hoda Barakat

Hoda Barakat is a Lebanese novelist born in 1952 in Bsharri. She is one of the most important and internationally recognized contemporary Arab writers, known for fiction that engages with the Lebanese Civil War, exile, and the fragmentation of identity with great psychological acuity and formal sophistication. She has lived in Paris since 1989. Barakat's major novels include The Stone of Laughter (Hajar al-Dahik, 1990), The Tiller of Waters (Harith al-Miyah, 2000), The Disciples of Passion (2004), and My Master and My Lover (2012). Her work is known for its experimental approach to narrative, its exploration of the gendered body in war, and its refusal of national or religious consolations. The Night Mail (Barid al-Layl), her IPAF-winning novel of 2019, is structured as a series of letters never delivered: migrants and exiles across the Arab world and Europe writing to loved ones they have left behind or lost. The novel is a meditation on displacement, loss, and the impossibility of return. Barakat is one of the great Arab writers of her generation, internationally recognized and widely translated. The Night Mail was translated into English by Marilyn Booth and published to wide critical acclaim.