Meet the author: Hoda Barakat

How do you best convey exile, homesickness and longing? Through letters, in essence a symbol of not being where you want to be, a symbol of separation and loss. That is precisely why Lebanese author Hoda Barakat chose the letter as the aptest form for her gripping novel The Night Mail. the night mail ‘“I chose [the novel’s] final form when scenes of migrants fleeing their countries had penetrated my imagination. Those people who have lost their homes and are scattered over the earth ...’ In The Night Mail, Hoda Barakat allows us to hear the voices of five different migrants through the letters they write somewhere between the Arabic world and Europe. The events recollected in the letters are set in indeterminate places in the Arab world, a world overrun by wars and crises. The letters have neither a destination address nor a sender, and will never reach the people they were intended for. a committed writer of war trauma Barakat has five novels and two plays under her belt as well as short stories, memoirs and journalistic work, and in virtually all her work, the writer deals with the violence, trauma and marginalization that war causes. The Night Mail also shows her commitment: ‘At this time, we are seeing a regression in the humanitarian dimension of those civilisations, as countries protect themselves by closing their doors. … I hope that this novel, somehow or other, will have given voice to brittle lives, which are judged by others without understanding them or investigating what brought them to their current state.’ “At this time, we are seeing a regression in the humanitarian dimension of those civilisations, as countries protect themselves by closing their doors. I hope that this novel, somehow or other, will have given voice to brittle lives, which are judged by others without understanding them or investigating what brought them to their current state.” Hoda Barakat was born in Lebanon in 1952. After studying French literature, she worked as a translator, teacher and journalist before moving to Paris towards the end of the Lebanese Civil War in the late 1980s. Her work has been translated into, among others, English, French, Spanish, Dutch and Turkish, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. In 2019 The Night Mail won the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction – the ‘Arabic Booker’, as it were. In 2017 she was in residence at Passa Porta.