Hisham Matar interview: ‘I carried this novel in my head for a decade’
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
Hisham Matar
Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London
He has been nominated for the Booker Prize twice – first shortlisted for In the Country of Men for the Booker Prize in 2006, and longlisted for My Friends in 2024. His memoir The Return was the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize among others, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford, the Costa Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. He is also the author of Anatomy of a Disappearance, and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024. Matar is a Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.
A complex and powerful meditation on what friendship means and a moving exploration of how exile impacts those forced to navigate a world where they cannot rest
— The 2024 judges on My Friends
All nominated books
An intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that friendship can provide
Whispers and fears intensify around a young boy in Hisham Matar’s gripping depiction of childhood confronted with the effects of revolution.
