Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo. He has lived most of his adult life in London, but since 2010 he has a home in New York City. His debut novel, In the Country of Men (2008), was shortlisted for the 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. He is also the author of the novel Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), which was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune.
His memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016), which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, explores the mysterious disappearance of his father. My Friends (2024), a novel about exile, friendship, and family, which won the 2024 Orwell prize for political fiction, was shortlisted for the National Book Award, and was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.
Matar serves as a professor at Barnard College and 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 30 languages. He lives in London and New York.