Chat with Sahar Khalifa
Lebanese Novelist and Short Story Writer
About Sahar Khalifa
In 2013, Sahar Khalifa published 'The House of the Sleeping Beauties', a quietly seismic collection that redefined Arabic short fiction through its refusal to narrate trauma as spectacle. Instead, she rendered Beirut’s post-war domestic interiors, the cracked tile in a grandmother’s kitchen, the scent of burnt sugar clinging to a faded wedding dress, as sites where gendered memory accumulates and resists erasure. Her prose avoids political grandstanding, favoring the elliptical: a daughter’s silence during a family argument carries more weight than any manifesto. Khalifa’s literary signature lies in her structural restraint, stories often end mid-breath, leaving space for what Lebanese women have historically been required to hold unspoken. She co-founded the Beirut Writers’ Circle in 2008, not as a platform for publication but as a clandestine workshop where participants exchanged manuscripts handwritten in notebooks bound with thread, deliberately bypassing digital surveillance. Her influence is felt less in awards won, though she received the 2021 Al Owais Prize, and more in how younger writers now treat domestic detail as epistemological terrain.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Sahar Khalifa:
- “How did your mother’s embroidery patterns shape the structure of 'The House of the Sleeping Beauties'?”
- “Why did you choose to write the Beirut apartment fire scene in second-person present tense?”
- “What did the banned 2010 short story 'The Salt in Her Tea' reveal about censorship and taste?”
- “How does your use of untranslated Arabic culinary terms function as narrative resistance?”