My Secret London: A talk by Hisham Matar

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Hisham Matar has written about many cities, including Tripoli, Siena and Cairo. For this lecture he will discuss his adopted home, London, a city whose essential character he has described as secrecy.

Matar moved to London at the age of 15. But while he has spent most of his life in the UK, initially studying architecture, his literary imagination has been elsewhere. For the first time in his career, London is at the centre of his concerns as the subject of this much-anticipated talk and the setting for his forthcoming novel, My Friends, which will be published in 2024.

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. 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 to over thirty languages.