Interview By Christophe Ayad, for Le Monde, July 25th, 2019
Some extracts translated into English published below.

Hoda Barakat is a rare kind of writer. Born in Lebanon in 1952, she published her first novel relatively late, in 1990, shortly after leaving her country because of the civil war.In six novels, she has won almost all of the most prestigious awards in Arabic literature:

Bo Hamby and Simone Popperl produced and edited this interview for broadcast at NPR. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.
The novelist and poet Sinan Antoon grew up in Baghdad, Iraq — a city that’s known many years of sorrow.
He was born to an Iraqi father and an American mother, and lived there until 1991. That was the year of the first U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he hid in the basement of a restaurant as U.S. bombs fell.
Antoon later moved to New York. But after the United States bombed …

“Coup de Théatre”, by Ursula Lindsey, for The New York Review of Books, June 26, 2019
In the spring of 1967, Sa’dallah Wannous, a young Syrian journalist and playwright, was studying theater at the Sorbonne in Paris. That June, after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, it gained control of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Sinai; about 100,000 Syrians were driven from the Golan Heights, which Israel still holds today. It is hard to overstate the psychic and political shock of this turn of events in …

By Janneken Øverland, in Bokmagasinet, Norway, June 2019
There are no knives in the kitchens of the city is the brilliant, depressive, rolling and falling history of a family  from Aleppo starting in 1960 to 2000.