Lebanese author, Hoda Barakat, has become only the second woman to win $50,000 in the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, the most prestigious prize for literature in the Arabic world which is run in conjunction with the Booker Prize Foundation in London and funded by Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi (DCT).
Barakat was selected from this year’s short-list of six writers, four of whom were female, for her book ‘The Night Mail’.
Alongside the prize fund of $50,000, Barakat will also see her novel translated into English by Oneworld Publications UK, and is set for release in 2020.
‘The Night Mail’ is written in epistolary form, and sees its characters leave their home in the Lebanon due to war and their personal painful past and uncertain future. The letters they write home to their remaining family are offered in an interconnecting and overlapping series throughout the tale.
According to the IPAF website, Professor Yasir Suleiman, Chair of the Board of IPAF Trustees, said the following about the winning entry, “Tightly structured, Hoda Barakat’s novel punches above its word count, turning brevity into a virtue. Using an epistolary structure to deal with displacement and its effects on the refugee experience, the novel exposes us to the precarious nature of human existence in a world in drift. The protagonists’ search for a common thread unites and separates them with equal cruelty. An intense and disciplined novel, The Night Mail will outlive the worlds that animated it. It is destined to speak to readers in multiple tongues because of the intensely human condition it evokes.”
At the award ceremony, in Abu Dhabi’s Fairmont Bab Al Bahr hotel on April 23rd, Barakat told listeners that she nearly didn’t enter this year’s competition due to only being long-listed in a previous year, but that Johnathon Taylor, the Booker Prize Foundation chairman, helped to convince her to enter. Barakat also claimed the ‘Arabic language is more important to me than any prize’.
After the award ceremony she said “I don’t seek exposure, I don’t seek popularity.”
“I don’t care about statistics and numbers,” she went on. “If I sell 15 books it’s fine, if I sell 50 books then that’s better.”
IPAF Administrator Fleur Montanaro, speaking at the ceremony, praised the accomplishments of the prize since its inception stating how 53 of the novels recognized by the prize have been translated into a total of 28 languages.
