Talks & Conversations

Hisham Matar: A Month in Siena

Lectures and Book Signings
Stairs leading up to a group of colorful buildings of different shapes and sizes.

Cover from Hisham Matar's A Month in Siena (2019) courtesy of the author

Cover from Hisham Matar's A Month in Siena (2019) courtesy of the author

Join us for a reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hisham Matar from A Month in Siena, a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life. After finishing his memoir The Return, Matar traveled to Siena, Italy, seeking solace and pleasure. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, he immersed himself in eight significant paintings dating from the 13th to the 15th centuries.

This book is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude—and shed further light on the world around us. Matar will take questions from the audience and sign books after the reading.

About Hisham Matar

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.

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A woman plays an upright piano as two boys play checkers at a table in this horizontal painting. The scene is loosely painted with areas of flat color and pattern. The people have pale, peachy skin and dark brown hair. Their facial features are painted with dots or short strokes of black. The piano is against the wall to our left. The woman wears a short-sleeved, lemon-yellow dress with a long skirt. A music book is propped on the music stand, and loosely painted objects line the top of the instrument. The wall behind the piano is patterned with white and pale yellow flowers under and around arches against a cranberry-red background. The table where the boys play is in the middle of the room. The players sit in wooden chairs and wear black and white striped jackets with white collars. The boy to our right looks at the board while resting his left cheek, closer to us, in his hand. The other boy looks on with his arms on the table in front of him. The checkerboard sits on a red and white striped cloth, which has lines of black dots in the white strips. Beneath the table is a floral rug with blue and black flowers against a red background. The border is painted loosely with leafy shapes against bright white. Beneath the area rug the floor or another carpet is garnet red with a diamond-shaped grid painted in orange. A petal-pink, upholstered chair sits in front of a tall wardrobe in the back corner of the room. A picture with two violins against a blue background hangs on the side of the furniture to our right. A chest of drawers next to the wardrobe holds a few bowls or objects and a white statue, about half human height. The statue is of a person standing with one knee bent in front of the other, one elbow tucked by the side with that hand held to the chest, and the other bent elbow raised overhead. Pictures hang on the wall around the statue, and the wallpaper there is ivory white with a dark yellow pattern. The artist signed the work in the lower right corner, “Henri Matisse.”

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This painting shows a woman sitting with her body turned to the right, her hands clasped around her knees and her head tilted up to the ceiling. Her eyes are closed, and her long, wavy hair flows over her shoulders and down her back. She has pale skin, and her face is illuminated by dramatic lighting, highlighting her round cheeks and small nose. She is wearing a white blouse with ruffled sleeves that drapes off of her right shoulder, exposing her neck, sternum, and part of her shoulder. Over this shirt she seems to be wearing a draped purple garment with a yellow border that covers her other shoulder and her legs. The background is dark.

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