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Hisham Matar Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Hisham Matar
Photo: © Diana Matar

Hisham Matar

How to pronounce Hisham Matar: ma-TARR

Hisham Matar Biography

Born in New York City to Libyan parents, Hisham Matar spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his adult life in London. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won numerous international prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Commonwealth First Book Award, the Premio Flaiano and the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, published in 2011, was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been translated into twenty-nine languages. He lives in London and New York.



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Interview

In an interview with the Booker Prize committee , the author of My Friends, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, talks about the classic that inspired him to become a writer, and why he always returns to Proust.

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book  

I wrote the opening paragraph and carried it in my head for a decade before I sat down to write the book. During that time I felt it work on me: the narrator's voice, the logic of his sentences, and his abiding passion for his friends. I gradually understood that the book was also a walk – a mapping of an exile, a city and a state of mind – that it was both thematically as well as metaphysically about friendship, its prose and syntax growing more familiar as it progressed, so that reading it would resemble a growing intimacy.  

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

Ibn Battuta's Travels, the mischievous and acrobatic essays of Al-Jahiz, and Italo Calvino's early short stories would be contenders. In poetry, Nizar Qabbani and Constantine Cavafy ran through my boyish days. But if I must choose one book, it would have to be The Arabian Nights, and if I'm to single out one sentence in that multifarious toolbox of a book, it would be when Shahrazad asks that most consequential question, 'Do I have your permission to tell a story?' which gradually, night after night, helps to distract the maddened Sultan away ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Hisham Matar at BookBrowse
My Friends jacket The Return jacket Anatomy of a Disappearance jacket In the Country of Men jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Hisham Matar but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Rabih Alameddine

    Rabih Alameddine

    Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; The Hakawati; The Wrong End of the Telescope; and the story collection, The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize. (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    My Friends

    Try:
    The Wrong End of the Telescope
    by Rabih Alameddine

  • Kenneth Bonert

    Kenneth Bonert

    Kenneth Bonert's work has appeared in McSweeney's 25, Grain, and The Fiddlehead. A former journalist, his work has appeared in the Globe and Mail and other publications. His story "Packers and Movers" was shortlisted for the ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    In the Country of Men

    Try:
    The Lion Seeker
    by Kenneth Bonert

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