Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. He has lived in London since 1986. His first novel, In the Country of Men, was published in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.

Praise For Anatomy of a Disappearance

"Something rare in contemporary fiction: a sophisticated storybook inhabited by archetypes, told with a 9-year-old's logic, written with emphatic and memorable lyricism of verse.”
—The New York Times Review of Books

“Matar writes beautifully . . . He is a nuanced observer with a gift for conveying both absurdity and raw emotion’
—The Guardian