Hisham Matar is an American-born British-Libyan novelist, essayist and memoirist. His debut novel, In the Country of Men (2006), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His memoir The Return (2016) won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Hisham Matar was born in New York City in 1970. His father, Jaballa Matar, worked for the Libyan mission to the United Nations. Jaballa was a critic of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi's 1969 coup. The family moved to Tripoli in 1973 but fled Libya in 1979. They settled in Cairo, Egypt, in 1980. Matar was nine years old.
In Cairo, Matar attended Cairo American College from age 12. He found learning English hard until he fell in love with Billie Holiday's music. His brother Ziad left for a Swiss boarding school in 1982. Four years later, Matar enrolled at a school in England under a false identity. He enrolled in 1986 after the Libyan regime made threats against his family.
He said in 2011: "I was to pretend that my mother was Egyptian and my father American. My first name was Bob. I was to try to forget my name. If someone called Hisham, I was not to turn."
Matar studied at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 1990, during his studies, his father was seized in Cairo. Letters received in 1996 showed that Jaballa had been moved to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. These were the last signs of him. Matar later heard that his father had survived a 1996 prison massacre.
After finishing his degree, Matar ran an office in London during his twenties. He began writing poetry before moving to prose. He left his office and worked various jobs, including acting and bookbinding. His first novel, In the Country of Me,n was published in 2006. It won the Guardian First Book Award and the Royal Society of Ondaatje Prize. He received a two-book deal with Penguin in 2005.
His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), features a father taken by the regime. Matar admits links to his own life but denies that the work is a memoir. The Return (2016) recounts his 2012 journey to Libya to search for his father. The memoir won the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2017.
Matar published A Month in Siena in 2019, a book about art and grief in Italy. His novel My Friends (2024) follows three Libyan exiles in London from the 1980s to 2011. The book was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2024 Orwell Prize for fiction. It also won the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
Matar said about My Friends: "I wrote the opening paragraph and carried it in my head for a decade before I sat down to write the book."
Hisham Matar became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Letters in 2013. He is now a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, but lives in London.
Photo credit: IG @hishamjmatar
