Hisham Matar's lifelong quest to discover how his father died
When he was eight years old, Hisham Matar's family left Libya. It was too dangerous for his father, opposition leader Jaballa Matar, to remain in the country.
Hisham Matar would not return to Libya until 33 years later — after the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi and 22 years after his father was kidnapped by Egyptian secret police in Cairo and handed over to the Gadhafi regime.
Matar believes his father may have been killed in a prison massacre in 1996, but he has never found proof. In the years since, he has often tried to "cure himself of his country," but in 2012, he returned to Libya in search of answers.
Because I don't know he died, when he died, where his body is, it has complicated my relationship to death...We don't know this until it happens, but our fathers stand at the gate between us and death. And so when they die in this way that is not quite clear, it complicates all of that.- Hisham Matar
Hisham Matar built an enviable literary reputation for himself during his exile, mostly in London. His novel, In The Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
His new memoir, a chronicle of Libya's opposition movements and his journey to discover what happened to his father, is already being hailed as a classic. It's called The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between.
Click the button above to hear Hisham Matar's conversation with guest host Laura Lynch.