Matar wins Folio Prize for his memoir ‘The Return’

In the UK, Hisham Matar has won the relaunched £20,000 (A$34,610) Rathbones Folio Prize for his memoir The Return (Viking), reports the Bookseller.

Matar’s memoir details the author’s search, ‘both physical and psychological’, for his missing father. Judges praised the title for ‘showing what a novelist at the top of his game can do with nonfiction’. ‘[The memoir also] gives the reader the same aesthetic, the same satisfaction of the great literary works that enter our lives and stay with us forever,’ said the judges.

The Return was chosen from a shortlist of eight.

The Rathbones Folio Prize is awarded to the best work of literature, regardless of form, written in English and published in the UK. The prize was suspended in 2016 after the Folio Society’s two-year sponsorship of the award came to an end. It was previously only open to works of fiction.

Category: International news