Join the University of Arkansas Honors College for a fireside chat with acclaimed novelist and memoirist Hisham Matar 4:30-6 p.m. today, Dec. 5, in the Honors Student Lounge (room 130, Gearhart Hall). Refreshments will be served and all are welcome to attend. 

Matar will also give a free public reading at 6 p.m., Dec. 6, in the Fayetteville Public Library as the 2016-17 Walton Visiting Writer in Fiction for the U of A Program in Creative Writing and Translation. No tickets are required, and all are welcome to attend.

Born in New York City to Libyan parents, Matar spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his adult life in London. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and won numerous international prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Commonwealth First Book Award, the Premio Flaiano and the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, published in 2011, was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune.

His memoir, The Return, was released in July 2016 and recently was shortlisted for the UK's most prestigious award for creative nonfiction, the Baillie Gifford Prize. The book chronicles Matar's 2012 return to Libya — after thirty years of political exile — in search of clues related to his father's disappearance, his family's past and the future of this nation on the brink of change.

These events are made possible by the J. William Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences, the Department of English, the Walton Family Foundation, the University of Arkansas Honors College and the Fayetteville Public Library.