[1] Her works are originally written in Arabic and have been translated into English, Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Romanian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese,[2][3] and Greek.
[6] In 1975 and 1976, she lived in Paris, where she worked towards a PhD, but she decided to return home when the Lebanese Civil War started.
In 1985, she released her first formal publication, a collection of short stories called Za'irat ("Women Visitors").
[citation needed] In fall 2013, Barakat was appointed the first Arabic Scholar in Residence at the University of Texas at Austin Middle Eastern Studies Program.
Her third novel, Harit al-miyah (The Tiller of Waters), won the 2001 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.