An illegal emigrant writes a letter to his lover; a torturer on the run writes his mother… 5 letters accidentally linked to each other.
 

Hoda Barakat wins the Sultan Bin Ali Al Owais prize, in the Novel category. The prize will be given to her during a ceremony in Dubai, in March 2018.
The very prestigious prize has been given in the past to major Arab artists, intellectuals and writers such as Sa’ad Allah Wanous, Abdul Rahman Mouneef, Nizar Qabbani, Edward Al Kharrat, Jamal Al Ghitani, Edward Said, Zakaria Tamir, Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, Elias Khoury, Amin Maalouf, and many more.
 
 

Translation by Marilyn Booth.
“Hoda Barakat’s THE KINGDOM OF THIS EARTH turns to the history of Lebanese Maronite Christians, from the Mandate period to shortly before the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in the mid-1970s. This scene, occurring very early in the novel, precedes a tragedy that will mark the family at the centre of the story, whose history of village pre-eminence puts them at the centre of local rivalries around class, land ownership, water rights, and gender politics. The ancestral past remains part of the present, as the children …

Hoda Barakat was a guest of Chiasso Letteraria 2016: Seconda classe, in Italy, and was interviewed by Stefano Montefiori, for La Lettura, Corriere della Sera, April 24th, 2016. Below, excerpts of a summary of this conversation, published on the blog imago 2.0.
Hoda Barakat, a Lebanese writer, after a period of great participation in events and discussions on the Arab world and its alleged features, decided to thin out her appearances in public, especially in the literary events currently focusing on the relationship between Europe and Islam in her second home, France.

By Guido Caldion, for Il Manifesto, published on November 15h, 2015
Hoda Barakat is among the most famous and brilliant Lebanese authors. She has lived in Paris for the past thirty years, at Place de la République, the epicentre of the terrorist attack that hit the French capital. Deeply knowledgeable about the works of Marcel Proust and Robert Musil, but also about the Arab poets of the ninth and tenth centuries, Barakat investigates the symbols and history of the Middle Eastern countries, returning to the crisis in that part of the world…
Born in 1952 in Beirut to a Christian …

Sharjah: It is not a writer’s job to categorise his or her book into any particular genre, it is for readers or critics to decide, a panel of Arab writers echoed during a literary session on the first evening of Sharjah International Book Fair 2015.
In a session on similarities between literary genres, a panel of renowned Arab writers Dr Shukri Al Makhbout, Fatima Sultan Al Mazroui and Hoda Barakat shared their thoughts on the similarities between genres and how writers are least bothered about the issues of classification of their …