The 12th edition of IPAF ceremony held in Abu Dhabi, on April 23rd, rewarded Hoda Barakat for her novel “Night Post”

The night post  is on the shortlist of the International Prize of Arabic Fiction (IPAF), or Arab Man Booker, that will be awarded in Abu Dhabi in April 2019.
“A writer of her time” who signs an “original and powerful” novel
– Mediapart –

Review and interview by Antoine Perraud and Faiza Zerouala for Mediapart, January 8th, 2019.
The Lebanese writer Hoda Barakat, captures the torments of refugees, their exile, their dispossession and the challenge posed to our societies, in an original and powerful epistolary novel, Courrier de nuit (Actes Sud). A serious and essential encounter.

A review by Damien Aubel, for Transfuges, December 2018
As all great epistolarians, Madame de Sevigne for example, the immense Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat knows that the art of correspondence is a metaphysical act. Here, a series of letters, with no direct link, follow each other as many variations on pain, and the exquisiteness of absence.

Hoda Barakat has imagined a correspondence written in haste, by people constantly on the run, all seeking a refuge that does not exist.
Muriel Steinmetz, for L’Humanité, November 22, 2018
Hoda Barakat (born in 1952, in Beirut), author of five novels published in France at Actes Sud, creates characters who wander the planet, men and women. Homeless, they are the victims of misery, social change and the conflicts that plague the world.

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, …