From Personal Truth to Literary Worlds: A Conversation on Narrative and Sensation

The journey from lived experience to the page is rarely a straight line. It winds through memory, emotion and the particular texture of a moment observed. At Abu Dhabi International Book Fair 2026, we encounter Jordanian writer and broadcaster Hind Khalifat navigating precisely this terrain, drawing from the rich material of her own life to craft something altogether more expansive: a novel that reaches toward transcendence itself.

Khalifat brings her work Nirvana into conversation as part of Podcast from Abu Dhabi, a series that invites us into the intimate space between writer and listener. The novel carries with it sensory depths and philosophical questions, meanings that shimmer at the edge of language. It is the kind of work that understands how the personal and the universal can occupy the same breath, how a single experience can open into something vast and transformative.

To read is to enter another consciousness, to feel the world through a different body, a different history. Khalifat’s presence at the fair speaks to Abu Dhabi’s role as a gathering place for voices from across the Arab world and beyond, a space where stories are shared and meaning is deepened through dialogue. The city has become a destination for those who believe in the power of literature to connect us across distance and difference.

The fair itself stands as testament to the enduring resonance of the written word, to the belief that books matter, that the conversations they spark matter. Here, among the shelves and the gathered readers, we are reminded that storytelling is not a solitary act but a generous one, an offering from writer to reader that transforms both in the exchange.