Hisham Matar

Books by Hisham Matar

In the Country of Men
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Anatomy of a disappearance
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The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
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Quotes by Hisham Matar

And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.
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And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that 'knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.
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And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that 'knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.
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And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.
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In the end, madness is worse than injustice, and justice far sweeter than freedom.
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In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home.
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Living in hope is a really terrible thing.
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Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.
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Turgenev's achievement lies in how he succeeded, in spite of himself, his country, and his time, in exempting his work from public duty. This has given it that unnameable quality that makes every sentence true, every silence trustworthy.
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The Arab Spring, with all of its failings and failures, exposed the lie that if we are to live, then we must live as slaves. It was an attempt to undermine not only the orthodoxy of dictatorship but also an international political orthodoxy where every activity must be approved by the profit logic of the 'ledger.'
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Grenfell, the building set on fire with the help of its own face, is a scene of a complex injustice: one that is moral, economic, political, and aesthetic. Not only was the cladding unsafe, it was ugly; not only was it ugly, it was untrue both to the architecture of the building it covered and untrue to its responsibility to human safety.
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Libyans are deeply unsettled by Gaddafi and his regime's careless contempt for human life. The dictatorship is willing to employ any methods necessary to remain in power.
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Gaddafi tried to give a masterclass to men like the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, on how to crush a civilian uprising.
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I am, by instinct, wary of revolutions. The gathering of the masses fills me with trepidation.
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