Courtesy
The Fayetteville Public Library will host author Hisham Matar for a public talk at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 6.
Matar is the University of Arkansas’ 2016–2017 Walton Visiting Writer in Fiction. His talk will focus on his new memoir, The Return, which details his father’s kidnapping and imprisonment in Qaddafi’s Libya and Matar’s search for his father in post-revolution Libya 22 years later.
The memoir presents Matar’s attempt to process his own feelings of love, loss and uncertainty. Matar parallels his own feelings to a country in search of its own identity following revolution and change.
Matar grew up in Tripoli and Cairo and has spent most of his adult life in London. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in addition to winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. A second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, followed in 2011.
Matar’s talk is presented in partnership with the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English, the Honors College and the Walton Family Foundation. The event is free and open to the public.
For more information, call 479-856-7207.
