Novel excerpt published by Word Without Borders, special issue on Lebanon, July 2018
Translated by Robin Moger.
Translator’s Note: Hoda Barakat’s slim novel The Night Post is composed of the texts of six letters interrupted midway through by short, fragmentary pieces of narrative prose. The following excerpt is taken from the beginning of the third letter. A young man, apparently pursued by the authorities, is at the airport when he sees a woman rip up and throw away a sheaf of papers (the novel’s second letter). He reassembles the torn pages and, prompted by their content, …

Published by Al Hayat, June 21st, 2018
Hoda Barakat’ Night Post speaks of the world’s dysfunction
She has her own style, in life as in writing. She rarely participates in cultural events because, in her own words, she doesn’t know the art of “marketing and shopping.” She won the Al Owais Award for all her work, which overflows with grief, loss and the search for meaning in the chaos around her. She writes eloquently about characters and dates, and she continued to do so in her latest novel The Night Post, her latest work, where she addresses …

Published by Asharq Al-Awsat, April 2nd, 2018
Barakat to Asharq Al-Awsat “I am comfortable with the frequency of my writing, and am not tempted by promotion”
In her latest novel, The Night Post, Hoda Barakat adopts a new “trick” to immerse the reader in a game of five letters, written by five different senders as confessions to people they will never see again.

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 …