We're thrilled that our first literary date of 2024 will be with Pulitzer Prize winning author of _The Return, In the Country of Men_, and _A Month in Sienna_: Hisham Matar.
Hisham will be joining us to discuss his latest novel _My Friends_; a masterful, intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that deep friendships can provide. Already heralded by Elif Shafak and Colm Toibin, _My Friends_ is bound to be one of the year's literary highlights.
Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed.
Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.
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. His memoir _The Return_ was the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, Frances Prix du Livre Etranger Inter & Le Journal du Dimanche and Germany's Geschwister Scholl Prize, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford, the Costa Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. He is also the author of the novels _In the Country of Men_, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and _Anatomy of a Disappearance_, and his most recent book is _A Month in Siena_. 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.