British-Libyan novelist Hisham Matar on 2024 Booker Prize longlist

British-Libyan author Hisham Matar's latest book, My Friends, is one of 13 titles longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize, the winner of which will be announced on November 12 in London.

The winning author will receive £50,000 ($61,000) and a trophy named Iris, in honour of the writer Iris Murdoch.

A shortlist of six final books will be announced on October 12.

This is the second time Matar has been nominated for the Booker Prize, with his debut novel, In the Country of Men, shortlisted in 2006.

My Friends follows the lives of Khaled and Mustafa, two Libyans who meet as university students in the UK and how their lives transform after they sustain injuries during a political demonstration outside the Libya embassy in London. With the onset of the revolution in Libya, they have to decide whether to stay in London or return to rebuild their homeland.

My Friends by Hisham Matar. Photo: Booker Prize

This year's judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal. He is joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; The Guardian’s fiction editor Justine Jordan; writer and professor Yiyun Li; and composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.

The panel praised My Friends for Matar’s sparse prose and moving examination of love and exile.

“It is both a complex and unsentimental meditation on what friendship means and a searingly moving exploration of how exile impacts those who are forced to live in this state of loss,” the judges said. “It is a book that we loved for its spareness of language and its deeply affecting storytelling.”

Born in New York City in 1970, Mattar and his family moved to Libya in 1973 before fleeing the country again to Cairo due to his father's opposition to the Libyan regime.

With his father kidnapped in Egypt and sent to prison, Mattar eventually relocated to London where he began his writing career in 2006.

He detailed the search for his father in the moving memoir, The Return, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 2017 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award.

While already viewed as an accomplished writer, if Matar wins the Booker Prize for My Friends, the book should receive a significant sales boost. According to the competition, last year's winning novel, Prophet Song, by Irish author Paul Lynch had a 1,500 per cent increase in sales in the week following its win, and topped the Irish book charts for several weeks.

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