This Booker longlist might just be the most enjoyable of recent years
Lisa Allardice
Three British novelists make Booker 2024 longlist among ‘cohort of global voices’
June 2024
Hisham Matar wins Orwell prize for political fiction
The Pulitzer winner’s third novel My Friends is based on an event from 1984, when officials opened fire on protesters at the Libyan embassy in London
March 2024
Authors withdraw from PEN America festival in protest over Israel-Gaza war
Group of more than a dozen writers decry organization’s inadequate response to ‘genocide’ being committed by Israel
January 2024
Books interview
Hisham Matar: ‘We all go through a lot. I’m wary of having “material”’
‘We are living in the century of fear’: Hisham Matar on why we need books
November 2022
Top 10s
Top 10 books about fathers and sons
In memoirs by authors from Philip Roth to Michael Frayn, the Dad-Lit genre is always a little oedipal but there is also room for warmer feelings
June 2020
Hisham Matar on how the Black Death changed art forever
After the plague, death became a silent companion for Renaissance artists. Hisham Matar recalls a month in Siena, exploring love, loss, mortality and art
December 2019
How to be hopeful
How to be hopeful: Hisham Matar on the surprising lessons of silence
The entire history of literature is a noble failure, says the novelist, a beautiful, heroic attempt to say something more lucid than what goes unsaid
November 2019
A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar review – art, love and loss
A Pulitzer-winning memoirist explores the life and art of Siena, as he comes to terms with the death of his Lybian father
October 2019
Books interview
Hisham Matar: ‘Writing is both the easiest and the most difficult thing’
The Libyan prize-winning author on how art helped him cope with his father’s disappearance – and the joys of Proust
April 2019
Books that made me
Fatima Bhutto: ‘David Foster Wallace on David Lynch is pretty funny’
The novelist on admiring Maggie Nelson and Rachel Kushner, and being irritated by William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
August 2018
Top 10s
Top 10 books about Americans abroad
Writers from Joan Didion to James Baldwin complicate the traditionally white and male tales of wide-eyed innocents at large
April 2018
Books that made me
Hisham Matar: International literature is hugely underrated, while English books are often overrated
The British-Libyan writer on an uncensored Arabian Nights, why Proust makes you feel smarter – and the diaries of a pianist that changed his life
May 2017
The Guardian view on non-fiction and fiction: quality is the issue
Folio prize goes to Hisham Matar's memoir The Return
December 2016
Philippe Sands uses book prize to raise £60,000 for charity
After the winner of the 2016 Baillie Gifford award announced plans to give away £30,000 award, other parties have more than matched it
