Hoda Barakat is a Lebanese novelist born in 1952 who specializes in contemporary literature. She spent a significant period of her early life in Beirut and then moved to Paris, France, where she has lived ever since. Despite her long residency in France, she has written all of her works in Arabic. Barakat refused to write in any language other than Arabic. Her works have been translated into several languages, including English, Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, German, and Greek. She won the Arabic Booker Prize in 2019 for her novel *Night Mail* and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2025 for her novel *Hind, or the Most Beautiful Woman in the World*.