International Prize for Arab Fiction (IPAF) 2020 Longlist.

What About Rachel, the Jewish Lady? offers a rich panorama of Syria in the days following the defeat of the 1967 six-day war, exposing police brutality at that time and the role played by the intelligence services in facilitating the emigration of Jews from Qamishli, in north-eastern Syria, smuggling them to Turkey and Lebanon, and thence to Cyprus. From there, they made their way to Palestine and America, where many settled in Brooklyn, New York. The novel gives an insight into life in the Jewish quarter of Qamishli, occupied by Jews, Kurds and Armenians, and is framed by the story of a teenage boy’s love for a girl living in the quarter.

Salim Barakat is a Kurdish-Syrian novelist and poet, born in Qamishli, northern Syria, in 1951. He studied Arabic language in Damascus for a year, before moving to Beirut in 1972, where he published five collections of poetry, two novels and two volumes of autobiography. In 1982, he moved to Cyprus to work as an editor on the prestigious Palestinian literary journal Al-Carmel, under its chief editor Mahmoud Darwish. Whilst there, he published a further seven novels and five poetry collections. In 1999, he moved to Sweden, where he now lives.