Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar is a Libyan-American novelist and memoirist whose work excavates the intersections of political violence, exile, memory, and family. Born in New York City to Libyan parents, he spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo before moving to England, where he was educated at the London School of Economics. His debut novel In the Country of Men (2006) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won several international prizes. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), further explored themes of political disappearance and paternal loss. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016), a memoir about his father's imprisonment and disappearance by the Gaddafi regime, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. The memoir was the culmination of decades of family anguish: Matar's father, a prominent dissident, was abducted by Egyptian intelligence and rendered to Libya in 1990, and was never seen again. Matar's novel My Friends (2024) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. He teaches at Columbia University and Barnard College in New York, where he lives.