Hoda Barakat
Appointments
Writer
2023 Spring
Biography
Born in Beirut in 1952, Hoda Barakat has lived in Paris since 1989. After graduating in French literature from the Lebanese University, she moved to Paris but returned home shortly after the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) and worked in education and journalism there.
Her powerful and innovative novels, written in Arabic, have been translated into almost 20 languages. These include The Stone of Laughter (1995), which features a gay male protagonist, and The Night Mail, which received the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. She has also been decorated twice by the French Ministry of Culture.
Barakat has taught at Dartmouth, Sorbonne Université, and other European and American colleges and universities. During her residency she taught "Language and Rebellion: Arabic Literature in a Comparative Context" in the Middle Eastern Studies Program.
Montgomery Conversations
Writing from the Borderlands
Hoda Barakat reflects on the role of literature in times of historical and political turmoil, engaging with the following questions: Where does writing come from? How can one write in an age of great uncertainty? What is the new landscape of writing? Moving beyond the dialectics of home and exile, and loss and estrangement that have characterized much of her work since the early 90s, Barakat engages with the concepts of “borderlands” as the new space and subject of writing, and of “anxiety” as both a somatic condition and a register of seismic transformations that unsettle and shape literary production in a new age.