Times of War – A Conversation with Hoda Barakat

Hoda Barakat’s writing has been praised for its classical, Lebanese-inflected Arabic, and for its bold exploration of ethical, social, and psychological collapse exposed in times of war. Barakat pushes the boundaries of narration by internalizing the war in fiction and interrogating the limits of language, of its ability to capture violence, madness, and desire. All of her novels and short stories are first-person male narratives, complicating gender perceptions and revealing how entwined sex, violence, and identity are. Barakat’s Arabic language unfolds through a uniquely poetic and philosophical prose.

Hoda Barakat is a Lebanese novelist, who was born in Beirut in 1952 and currently lives in France. She has published six novels, two plays, a book of short stories, and a book of memoirs, as well as contributing to books written in French. Her work has been translated into a number of languages. She received the ‘Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ in 2002 and the ‘Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite National’ in 2008. Her novel The Tiller of Waters (1998) won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and has been published in excerpts in Banipal magazine. Her fifth novel The Kingdom of This Earth (2012) reached the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) longlist in 2013. In 2015, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. In 2019, she won the IPAF prize for her novel The Night Mail and received the prestigious Montgomery Fellowship from Dartmouth University.

AGYA alumnus Prof. Dr. Bilal Orfali, Sheikh Zayed Chair for Arabic and Islamic Studies, interviews the Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat.

The conversation will be held in Arabic with simultaneous translation into English. If you want to participate, please register here.

If you are interested, you can find the flyer of the event in English and Arabic.