Hisham Matar: A Month in Siena
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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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