Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar is a Libyan-British novelist and memoirist, born in New York City in 1970. ¹ He grew up in Tripoli and in exile in Cairo after his family fled Muammar Gaddafi's Libya; his memoir The Return (2016), about the search for his father Jaballa, abducted in Cairo in 1990 and never found, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. ¹

Matar was born in New York City in 1970, where his father Jaballa Matar was serving in the Libyan delegation to the United Nations; the family returned to Tripoli three years later. ¹ As his father, a prominent opponent of the regime, was pursued by the authorities, the family left Libya surreptitiously for Egypt in 1979 and lived in exile in Cairo from 1980; Matar was schooled at Cairo American College and then, from 1986, sent to boarding school in England, where for his safety he lived under a false identity. ¹ He has recalled his headmaster's instructions: "I was to pretend I was Christian, though not religious." ¹ The museum records this as what it was — an imposed disguise he describes as pretence, not a statement of faith — and no source states Matar's own religion, so none is recorded. ² He studied architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, and ran an architectural practice in London before turning to writing. ¹ In 1990 his father was abducted by Egyptian secret-police agents in Cairo and handed to the Libyan regime; two letters from him reached the family from Abu Salim prison in 1996, and a fellow prisoner reported in 2002 that he was still alive, but his fate remains unknown. ¹ Matar has lived in London for over three decades and is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. ¹

His first novel, In the Country of Men (2006), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and translated into twenty-eight languages. ¹ Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011) tells of another disappeared father. ¹ The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016), his memoir of returning to Libya after the fall of Gaddafi to search for his father, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 and the Folio Prize, and was named among the New York Times' ten best books of the year. ¹ A Month in Siena (2019) meditates on Sienese painting and grief, and his novel My Friends (2024) won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. ¹ He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the British Academy, and was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in 2024. ¹

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