He struggled with learning English, until he discovered a love for Billie Holiday, and also felt no affinity for his fellow students, most of whom were the offspring of American diplomats and military personnel.

If someone called Hisham, I was not to turn.After trying his hand at music and finding that he had no talent for it,[9] Matar studied architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

In 1996, the family received two letters in his father's handwriting stating that he had been kidnapped by the Egyptian secret police, handed over to the Libyan regime, and imprisoned in the notorious Abu Salim prison in the heart of Tripoli.

In 2009, Matar reported that he had received news that his father had been seen alive in 2002, indicating that Jaballa had survived a 1996 massacre of 1200 political prisoners by the Libyan authorities.

He left his architectural practice, and worked in a variety of jobs, including acting, stonemasonry, and bookbinding, until his first novel, In the Country of Men was published in 2006.

[4] As of October 2024[update] Matar is professor of professional practice in English and Asian and Middle Eastern cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University,[11] but continues to live in London.

[14] Matar has explored themes of loss and exile in his first two novels, as well as in his memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between.

You have not seen the person sitting beside you, but you have a sense of them, of what they might be like, or of how the music is affecting them, the weight of their silence.Matar began writing his first novel, In the Country of Men, in early 2000.

[17] The memoir centers on Matar's return to his native Libya in 2012 to search for the truth behind the 1990 disappearance of his father, a prominent political dissident of the Gaddafi regime.

[18] ISBN 0-670-92333-8 Il Libro di Dot is a children's book written by Matar and illustrated by Gianluca Buttolo, published in 2017.

The short book is an affectionate and reflective record of his most recent stay in Siena, Italy and his encounters there with Sienese School artworks.