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How to pronounce Hisham Matar: ma-TARR
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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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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