Born in Beirut and resident in Paris since 1989, Barakat has built a body of fiction notable for its formal range and its preoccupation with marginal, broken, often male protagonists — a hashish-grower, a tailor, an exile writing letters. Her early novel Hajar al-Dahk (The Stone of Laughter, 1990) was one of the first Arabic novels with an openly homosexual central character.
Bareed al-Layl (Voices of the Lost, 2017) won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2019. The novel consists of a sequence of unsent letters, each picked up by the next narrator, traced across a continent of Arab displacement. Barakat's prose, in Marilyn Booth's English translation, is restrained and chilly in a way that feels new for the Arabic novel.
Recurring themes
marginal masculinities
exile and displacement
the unreliable letter as form
the long shadow of the Lebanese civil war
Selected works
- 1990The Stone of Laughter
- 1993Disciples of Passion
- 1998The Tiller of Waters
- 2004My Master, My Lover
- 2012The Kingdom of This Earth
- 2017Voices of the Lost