Barrack Zailaa Rima Author

A graphic novelist and filmmaker, Barrack Zailaa Rima was born in 1972 in Tripoli, Lebanon, and has lived in Brussels for more than thirty years. While she explored a wide variety of media and art forms in her early career, Barrack now devotes herself to graphic fiction.

A former member of the Beirut-based Samandal collective, she is the author of several graphic fictions, editorial cartoons, and compelling works of comics journalism including The Storyteller of Cairo, Beirut, and Sociologia. Her latest graphic novel, Dans le taxi, published by Alifbata Editions, received the prestigious Mahmoud Kahil Award for the best graphic novel from the MENA region (Lebanon, 2022) and the Grenades Literary Prize (Belgium, 2022).

Numerous trips between Lebanon and Belgium have punctuated Barrack’s career, resulting in publications, workshops, courses, production, and multiple collaborations. She has also exhibited and published in various projects around the Mediterranean, Tunisia, Switzerland, Palestine, Italy, France, the United States, and Germany.

Translators Carla Calargé and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek are specialists of the MENA region. As longtime collaborators, they have co-edited a volume of Nouvelles études francophones (34.1, 2019) on (the margins of) Francophone comics, and they have written more than a dozen of articles on graphic works from the Arab world.