Event

Join us for an evening with Hisham Matar, Pulitzer winning Libyan memoirist and novelist. Matar's father, Jaballa Matar, a Libyan businessman who became a prominent critic of the Muammar el-Qaddaffi's dictatorship in the late 1970s, was jailed in Tripoli's Abu Salim prison, a notorious torture site where approximately 1,270 prisoners were massacred in June 1996. Whether Jaballa Matar was among them has never been established as the Libyan regime has refused to disclose his fate. Hisham Matar's autobiography The Return (2017) for which he recieved the Pulitzer Prize deals with this trauma.

Hisham Matar will be in conversation with Heather Sharkey, Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages  and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania and Eileen Ryan, Associate Professor of History, Temple University.