A Reading and Conversation with Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar will discuss his Pulitzer prize winning book The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between. Matar was nineteen when his father was kidnapped and taken prisoner in Libya. Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Gaddafi, Matar was able to return to his homeland for the first time. In this heart-breaking, illuminating memoir he describes his return to a country and a family he thought he would never see again. Hisham Matar’s debut novel In the Country of Men was published in twenty-nine languages and won numerous international prizes as well as being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was published to great acclaim in 2011. He lives in London and New York.

Sponsored by The Department of English and American Literatures, the Department of Arabic, the Creative Writing Program, and the Academic Enrichment Fund.