was born in 1960 in Beirut, studied theatre and film. She lives in Paris as a journalist, working for a number of Lebanese newspapers and international radio stations. She has published six novels in Arabic and one in French. She is the translator into Arabic of Albert Camus' notebooks.

Luke Leafgren, who won the 2018 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, has translated two of her novels into English – Oh Salaam! (Interlink, 2015) and Mister N (And Other Stories, 2022).

In 2009 she set up a writers' workshop, based in Beirut, called Mohtaraf workshops for fiction, play and script writing for young writers. 

Banipal 22 (Spring 2005) published an excerpt from her novel A Bus of Good People (Dar al-Adab, 1996), for which the Lebanese Cultural Forum in Paris awarded Najwa Barakat the "Prize of the best literary creation of the year" in 1997. 

Luke Leafgren also published an excerpt of the novel in the magazine Missing Slate.


Contributor's Issues

Banipal 22 - Spring 2005

Banipal 75 - Celebrating 25 Years of Arab Literature

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