Celebrated Lebanese/French novelist Hoda Barakat, who won the 2025 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Literature category for her novel Hind, or the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, spoke with PW about broadening her audience, having her work translated into other languages, and how she keeps her creative juices flowing.

What can you share about your evolution as an author? In what ways has your journey surprised you?

That's a difficult question. I may be able to evaluate my career at the age of 80 perhaps. At the moment, my concern is with the next novel as soon as it starts to haunt me.

I was surprised right from my first novel by the way it was received in the Arab world. The central character is a gay man...and it was a first of its kind, praised instead of damned, and in my search for the beauty of the Arabic language—considered by some to be a sacred language—written by a Christian who draws her inspiration from the suras of the Koran!? I remain surprised and in the grace of gratitude.

Among other topics and themes, Hind, or the Most Beautiful Girl in the World explores standards of beauty while also focusing on individuals on the fringes of society. Can you talk about these elements of the book?

Individuals on the margins of their society, the weak and the powerless, people who are strangers in the very heart of their own country and who come up against the violence of the outside world without being able to understand its complexity, who hesitate and have no ideological or other reference that reassures them: these are always my characters.

In terms of broadening your audience for Hind, or the Most Beautiful Girl in the World, what type of distribution and/or translation opportunities are you hoping to see going forward?

Distribution is not my business. I think my real work stops as soon as I've finished writing a text. And that's no mean feat.

Then there's life, and that's not easy to manage, because in some ways I'm a lot like my characters.

When it comes to translations, I like to hope for as many languages and countries as possible. Each new language is a gateway to heaven. It's a way of saying, "This is where I am, and we are very much alike in this fractured world, fractured by wounded memories and misunderstandings."

And can you comment more broadly on the experience of having your work translated into different languages?

As I said, you send the most beautiful and deepest part of yourself as a love letter and a complaint. You call out to the other, to the different, to say, "Listen to my breath, my breathing, the quiver of my voice... " When it works and you receive a response, however distant, it's an immense joy and a consolation.

What sustains your creativity?

In fact, I don't know. And I prefer not to know for fear of being seduced by the success of a previous work. Somehow I think I continue to be distressed by the world.

I haven't mellowed with time and our age is becoming unreadable—particularly unreadable and disturbing, with no logical thread running through it, and more serious in its catastrophic promises at every level of humanity and the planet.

And it seems to me that we've run out of "ideas," which means that we're incapable of using our imagination or creating illusions.

It's very sad and too violent.

Do you have personal experience with acromegaly? Why did you decide to center the story on a character with this condition?

No, no personal experience. But the emotional adventures and surprising activities of consciousness are personal experiences, especially at the time of writing. At least for me. For example, my knee hurt a bit when Hind was badly injured there.

I felt the ugliness and deformity of modern cities, or cities described as such, as a physical assault on my eyes and even on my whole body. The light, the temperature, the way you breathe, everything is altered and corrupted. And Beirut in particular, already destroyed by the long years of civil war. Too beautiful before, we went into denial.

In our quest to make ourselves feel less guilty, we invented a city out of nostalgia, or we continued to destroy it because it no longer resembled the one we knew. Killing for love in both cases. Never seeing the face of the loved one again or throwing acid at it.

Do you sense that there are certain conceptual threads that carry across all of your books?

I don't really know. I don't think about it too much, to be honest.

Your characters are so rich and morally complex. Do you find your characters take shape as you are creating their stories, or do you shape the story around them?

In short, each novel has its own story. But it starts with a voice. I start by putting my ear to the mouth of someone who stubbornly wants to tell me their story, any story. I have to be very patient before I see my first sentence on paper. That's why I only release a new novel after at least 4 or 5 years of slow, painstaking writing.

What does it mean to you to have won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Hind, or the Most Beautiful Girl in the World?

A great joy. I've been living in France for a long time, far from the Arab world, even though I write in Arabic. Arabic is a difficult choice for me, first because I discovered the immense and indefinable beauty of this language late in life. I studied French and was "programmed" for it. So it's a great challenge for both reading and writing, whether in terms of identity or "promotion." Arabic is a very demanding language, and working with it is like working with precious metals. Respecting its memory and modernizing it is the perpetual challenge of all my texts. And so any recognition, prize, or celebration from such a prestigious body as Sheikh Zayed is doubly gratifying.

The organizers of this prize, at all levels, are doing a very serious job of supporting the Arabic language in total freedom and independence, and even with a view to an international dimension, since they are helping publishing houses to translate Arabic writers into all the languages of the world, efficiently and without directives or ideology. I am happy and proud of this.

Are you working on anything new you can share with us?

Yes, but I can't talk about it until I've put the finishing touches to it!