By Christophe Ayad, For Le Monde, July 2019
(Photo credit: Lea Crespi, Pasco)
Great talks with great writers 2 | 5. The Lebanese writer, translated all over the world, received the coveted “Arab Booker” in April. This meeting takes place in Paris, her adopted city, where she talks about literature, religion, and the civil war that ignites the Arab world.
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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:

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

By Melhem Chaoul, for L’Orient littéraire, published April 2019.
Starting with the title, Malek al-Hind (The King of India): There are no kings (in that story), let alone Kings of the Indian peninsula. By this metaphor, Jabbour Douaihy signifies the absence of power, the absence of control over fate, such as the Viceroy of the Indies at the time of the British Empire who managed a state whose fate was decided elsewhere.
Zaccaria Mubarak’s destiny is thus fashioned, fluctuating like the “Raft of the Medusa” on the murky waters of countries and continents.
The novel begins …

In Stella Maris, Adam has decided to write his story, that of the “New Adam”, which, he would like to believe, starts when he runs away from home at 15, to go as far as possible from his childhood in the ghetto of Lydda (My name is Adam, Children of the ghetto 1), and from his mother Manal. The New Adam is in a painful quest of a restful identity: “I want to become a Jew”, he says. “This is impossible” he is told. 

A detective story set on the background of family and sectarian feuds, The king of India, explores with the right dose of irony, the meaning of attachment to the land.