Hisham matar biography of william hill

Interview

In an interview with the Booker Prize committee , the author of My Friends, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, talks about the classic that inspired him to become a writer, and why he always returns to Proust.

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book  

I wrote the opening paragraph and carried it in my head for a decade before I sat down to write the book.

During that time I felt it work on me: the narrator's voice, the logic of his sentences, and his abiding passion for his friends. I gradually understood that the book was also a walk – a mapping of an exile, a city and a state of mind – that it was both thematically as well as metaphysically about friendship, its prose and syntax growing more familiar as it progressed, so that reading it would resemble a growing intimacy.  

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

Ibn Battuta's Travel ‘My Friends’ by Hisham Matar – Reading Matters FEVU