19 Facts About Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar is an American-born British-Libyan novelist, essayist, and memoirist.

Hisham Matar was born in New York City in 1970, the son of Jaballa Matar, who was considered a political dissident for his opinions on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi's 1969 coup, and had to move the family away from Tripoli.

Hisham Matar was working for the Libyan delegation to the United Nations, in New York, at the time of Matar's birth.

Hisham Matar was nine when they moved to Cairo, Egypt, where the family lived in exile from 1980, and where Hisham Matar's father became more vocal against the Gaddafi regime.

Hisham Matar did not enjoy his schooling there, and his academic achievements plunged compared with his time in Libyan and Egyptian public schools.

Hisham Matar struggled with learning English, until he discovered a love for Billie Holiday, and felt no affinity for his fellow students, most of whom were the offspring of American diplomats and military personnel.

Hisham Matar chose a school in England and enrolled in 1986, and started enjoying school again.

In 2009, Hisham Matar reported that he had received news that his father had been seen alive in 2002, indicating that Jaballa had survived a 1996 massacre of 1200 political prisoners by the Libyan authorities.

For some years during his 20s, Hisham Matar ran his own architectural practice in London.

Hisham Matar started writing poetry, before moving to prose forms, as he found that his poems were becoming more narrative.

Hisham Matar left his architectural practice, and worked in a variety of jobs, including acting, stonemasonry, and bookbinding, until his first novel, In the Country of Men was published in 2006.

Hisham Matar founded and is the principal curator of the Barnard International Artists Series, "a forum for considering the world through the works of living artists", which was launched in November 2012.

Hisham Matar has explored themes of loss and exile in his first two novels, as well as in his memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between.

Hisham Matar's writing often borrows from and refers to painting, architecture, and music.

Hisham Matar began writing his first novel, In the Country of Men, in early 2000.

Il Libro di Dot is a children's book written by Hisham Matar and illustrated by Gianluca Buttolo, published in 2017.

On 17 October 2019, Hisham Matar published A Month in Siena.

Hisham Matar's essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Financial Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times.

In 2013 Hisham Matar was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.