Matar's

Rania Matar's A Girl And Her Room photographic exhibition reveals teen girls in their most treasured spaces; a film series at the Mosaic rooms offers a crash course in the latest in Arabic cinema; winners of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction will read at the Southbank; and the Barbican will transform into Tahrir Square for a "people power" concert.

This week's new events 2011

But the RSL Ondaatje prize has recognised it in prize-winners as diverse as Graham Robb's wide-ranging study of France achieved after 14,000 miles by bicycle, James Meek's fictional but bleakly realised Siberia, and Hisham Matar's Libya.

Colin Thubron on the literature of place 2011

Matar's family has set up a website on which it said it received two letters from Matar saying that he was kidnapped by Egypt's secret police and handed over to Libyan authorities.

Gadhafi leaned on Arab allies to stay in power 2011

Matar's family has set up a website on which it said it received two letters from Matar saying that he was kidnapped by Egypt's secret police and handed over to Libyan authorities.

Gadhafi leaned on Arab allies to stay in power 2011

Rania Matar's A Girl And Her Room photographic exhibition reveals teen girls in their most treasured spaces; a film series at the Mosaic rooms offers a crash course in the latest in Arabic cinema; winners of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction will read at the Southbank; and the Barbican will transform into Tahrir Square for a "people power" concert.

This week's new events 2011

Hisham Matar's first novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for a number of literary prizes including the 2006 Man Booker Prize, and won the 2007

Hisham Matar biography 2008

Taking us to a time and place rarely glimpsed in fiction, Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men captures life in Libya in the wake of Muammar al-Qaddafi's revolution.

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar: Questions 2007

Matar's writing is arrestingly evocative, blending raw emotion with tiny, seemingly incongruous details seen through the eyes of a child, details that serve to fill the adult reader, who can interpret what the child sees in the wider context, with fear as he or she picks up the traces of impending doom lurking behind the innocuous.

In the Country of Men: Summary and book reviews of In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar. 2007

Labeled by some as the "Libyan Kite Runner", In The Country of Men does share some similarities with Khaled Hosseini's runaway bestseller in that both are about young boys growing up in countries experiencing political implosion, with the result that their boy-sized mistakes take on adult-sized consequences; but Matar's prose is leaner than Hosseini's, and his themes share more with Ian McEwan's Atonement than with The Kite Runner.

In the Country of Men: Summary and book reviews of In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar. 2007

How does a bookBaba's lone, dangerous tome saved from the firedrive the plot of Hisham Matar's book?

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar: Questions 2007