Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents and lived in Tripoli, Cairo and Paris before making London his home in 1988. His literary debut Niemandsland (No One In The World) has been highly anticipated even before publication. The British publisher Viking spared no expense in securing the rights, and the book has been translated into thirteen languages. The Netherlands has the world premiere: the novel will be published by Meulenhoff in early May.

The story takes the reader to the oppressive Tripoli of the late 1970s, where nine-year-old Suleiman grows up under Gaddafi’s dictatorship. The horrors of this regime become concrete for him when the father of his best friend is arrested and his execution is later shown on television. Then his own father disappears, he sees his mother desperately burning his books, and events take a decisive turn. Niemandsland is a sensitive, vivid and compelling Bildungsroman, described by J.M. Coetzee as “a poignant story of a child exposed too early to the brutalities of Libyan politics.”