British-Libyan novelist Hisham Matar’s latest book, My Friends, is on the 2024 Booker Prize longlist. The Booker Prize, which includes a £50,000 cash award, is an highly coveted honor.
This prize is open to authors of any nationality, providing the book under consideration has been published in the UK. This is Hisham Matar’s second time being on the Booker Prize longlist. He was first nominated in 2006 for his novel In the Country of Men, which made it to the shortlist. Matar is the only Libyan author to have ever been nominated.
Matar has published five books, winning awards for his work including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book award, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, among others. Matar draws on his own experience growing up in a Libyan family and the struggles that he experienced through his identity to guide his writing.
My Friends was published on January 11th of this year by Viking Press. The book is “an intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that friendship can provide.” Two Libyan friends, Khaled and Mustafa, meet at university in Edinburgh.
They decide to travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on the demonstration, Khaled and Mustafa’s lives are completely changed. Read the full Booker Prize description here.
This year’s judges of the Booker Prize, Edmund de Waal, Sara Collins, Yiyun Li, Justine Jordan, and Nitin Sawhney, had great things to say about My Friends:
A complex and powerful meditation on what friendship means and a moving exploration of how exile impacts those forced to navigate a world where they cannot rest.
There are twelve other authors included in the longlist for the Booker Price. A shortlist of six will be announced in September. The winner will be revealed at a ceremony in London in November.
The other titles included in this list are Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, Colin Barrett’s Wild Horses, Anne Michaels’s Held, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, Richard Powers’s Playground, Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, Percival Everett’s James, Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, and Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot.
The Chair of judges, Edmund de Waal, says that the books in the longlist are “works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments.” He adds that these works in particular have “made a space in our hearts and that we want to see find a place in the reading lives of many others.”
Source: Brittle Paper
