Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar was born in 1970 in New York to Libyan parents (his father was serving at the Libyan delegation to the UN at the time). He spent his childhood in Tripoli from 1973 to 1979, when his family permanently left Libya and settled in Cairo due to disagreements with Muammar Gaddafi's regime. He has spent most of his adult life in London. His first novel, "In the Country of Men," was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and The Guardian First Book Award, and won numerous awards, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, Commonwealth First Book Award, Premio Flaiano, and Premio Gregor von Rezzori. His second novel, "Anatomy of a Disappearance," was published in 2011. His Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical work "The Return" in the Biography/Autobiography category was published in 2016 and has been translated into twenty-nine languages. Today, the author lives between London and New York.