Books by Hisham Matar
Add a: Month in Siena, Hisham Matar’s perspective on Classical art, confident/ understands it completely, but adds a new perspective to it because of his Muslim heritage. That’s what is significant about it. Also a sweet, unpretentious book.
“My Friends by Hisham Matar is a novel that explores the fallout of the 1984 shootings at the Libyan embassy in London, and its effect on three friends. The quietness of the prose belies the event’s traumatic drama and its profound personal and political repercussions. The style is old-fashioned – genteel almost – and authentic to the point of reading like the most exquisite memoir. A warm and extraordinarily clear-sighted novel that is, in part, about the power of the literary word to effect real-world change” Read more...
The Best Political Novels of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Fiction
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between
by Hisham Matar
🏆 Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
“It’s one of those books that you can sit and read, very easily, in one sitting. Hisham Matar is telling one story, rather than weaving together many different elements. It’s about a UK-based writer whose father disappeared in Libya. At the start of the book, he is about to go back to Libya, having left as a small child to go into exile. He’s interweaving his own journey to Libya, after the fall of Gaddafi, with the story of his father and his efforts to find the truth of what happened to him. The story is gripping in itself and, although many books have been written about the Arab Spring and different regimes in the Middle East, I didn’t feel I had read such a personal story of Gaddafi’s Libya.” Read more...
Stephanie Flanders, Economist
Interviews where books by Hisham Matar were recommended
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1
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
by Jason Roberts -
2
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
by Ilyon Woo -
3
King: A Life
by Jonathan Eig -
4
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
by Beverly Gage -
5
Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South
by Winfred Rembert -
6
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne & Tamara Payne
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies
The Pulitzer Prize for Biography is awarded annually to “a distinguished and appropriately documented” biography by an author from or based in the United States. The authors of winning books receive $15,000, and join a starry pantheon of great American writers. Here, we’ve put together a summary of all the Pulitzer-winning biographies since the turn of the millennium.
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1
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between
by Hisham Matar -
2
Negroland: A Memoir
by Margo Jefferson -
3
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
by Svetlana Alexievich -
4
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity
by Philippe Sands -
5
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War
by Robert J. Gordon
Best Nonfiction Books of 2016, recommended by Stephanie Flanders
Best Nonfiction Books of 2016, recommended by Stephanie Flanders
Stephanie Flanders, chair of this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, talks us through some of the best nonfiction books of 2016.
The Best Political Novels of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Fiction
The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction is awarded annually to “outstanding novels and collections of short stories, first published in the UK or Ireland, that illuminate major social and political themes, present or past, through the art of narrative.”
