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My Friends (novel)
''My Friends'' is a 2024 novel by Hisham Matar published by Penguin Random House. The novel tells the story of three Libyan friends living in London as exiles from their country. The story follows their intertwined lives from the 1980s to the 2011 Arab Spring. Fearing retribution from the Gaddafi regime, they are fearful of returning to their own country or contacting their families. Similar to Matar' previous works, the novel focuses on themes of government oppression and violence, as well as the lives of exiles abroad. The novel was nominated for several awards; it was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, nominated for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, and won the Orwell Prize for political fiction and the 2025 National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award for fiction. Narrative The narrator, Khaled, grows up in Libya and leaves as a young adult in 1983 to study at the University of Edinburgh. While at University, he befriends fellow student Mustafa, who is also from Lib ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hisham Matar
Hisham Matar (; born 1970) is an American-born British-Libyan novelist, essayist, and memoirist. His debut novel '' In the Country of Men'' was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, and his memoir of the search for his father, '' The Return'', won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and several other awards. Matar's essays have appeared in ''The New Yorker'', ''The Guardian'', ''The New York Times'', and many other publications. He has also written several other novels. Early life and education Hisham Matar was born in New York City in 1970, the son of Jaballa Matar, who was considered a political dissident for his opinions on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi's 1969 coup, and had to move the family away from Tripoli. He was working for the Libyan delegation to the United Nations, in New York, at the time of Matar's birth. The family moved back to Tripoli in 1973, but fled the country again in 1979. Matar was nine when they moved to Cairo, Egypt, where the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penguin Random House
Penguin Random House Limited is a British-American multinational corporation, multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, with the merger of Penguin Books and Random House. Penguin Books was originally founded in 1935 and Random House was founded in 1927. It has more than 300 Publishing imprint, publishing imprints. Along with Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House is considered one of the "Big Five (publishers), Big Five" English-language publishers. On April 2, 2020, Bertelsmann announced the completion of its purchase of Penguin Random House, which had been announced in December 2019, by buying Pearson plc's 25% ownership of the company. With the purchase, Bertelsmann became the sole owner of Penguin Random House. Bertelsmann's German-language publishing group Verlagsgruppe Random House will be completely integrated into Penguin Random House, adding 45 imp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arab Spring
The Arab Spring () was a series of Nonviolent resistance, anti-government protests, Rebellion, uprisings, and Insurgency, armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. It began Tunisian revolution, in Tunisia in response to corruption and economic stagnation. From Tunisia, the protests initially spread to five other countries: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain. Rulers were deposed (Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt all in 2011, and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen in 2012) and major uprisings and social violence occurred, including riots, civil wars, or insurgencies. Sustained street demonstrations took place in Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Sudan. Minor protests took place in Djibouti, Mauritania, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Western Sahara. A major slogan of the demonstrators in the Arab world is ''Ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam, ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an- ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Muammar Gaddafi
Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (20 October 2011) was a Libyan military officer, revolutionary, politician and political theorist who ruled Libya from 1969 until Killing of Muammar Gaddafi, his assassination by Libyan Anti-Gaddafi forces, rebel forces in 2011. He came to power through a 1969 Libyan revolution, military coup, first becoming Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic, Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then the Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution, Brotherly Leader of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011. Initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, Gaddafi later ruled according to his own Third International Theory. Born near Sirte, Italian Libya, to a poor Bedouin Arab family, Gaddafi became an Arab nationalist while at school in Sabha, Libya, Sabha, later enrolling in the Benghazi Military University Academy, Royal Military Academy, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2024 Booker Prize
The 2024 Booker Prize is a literary award worth £50,000 given for the best English-language novel published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024 in either the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner, Samantha Harvey (author), Samantha Harvey for her sci-fi novel ''Orbital (novel), Orbital'', was announced on 12 November 2024 at Old Billingsgate in London. Of the thirteen authors on the 2024 longlist, announced on 30 July 2024, three (Colin Barrett (author), Colin Barrett, Rita Bullwinkel, Yael van der Wouden) were debut novelists and six (Percival Everett, Samantha Harvey (author), Samantha Harvey, Rachel Kushner, Hisham Matar, Claire Messud, Richard Powers) had been nominated previously. The longlist also featured the first Dutch (van der Wouden) and Native American (Orange) authors ever to be longlisted. Regarding the thirteen novels in the longlist, chair of the judging panel Edmund de Waal stated that the works varied widely in their style and mood, however he stated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Book Award For Fiction
The National Book Award for Fiction is one of five annual National Book Awards, which recognize outstanding literary work by United States citizens. Since 1987, the awards have been administered and presented by the National Book Foundation, but they are awards "by writers to writers." The panelists are five "writers who are known to be doing great work in their genre or field." General fiction was one of four categories when the awards were re-established in 1950. For several years beginning 1980, prior to the Foundation, there were multiple fiction categories: hardcover, paperback, first novel or first work of fiction; from 1981 to 1983 hardcover and paperback children's fiction; and only in 1980 five awards to mystery fiction, science fiction, and western fiction. When the Foundation celebrated the 60th postwar awards in 2009, all but three of the 77 previous winners in fiction categories were in print. The 77 included all eight 1980 winners but excluded the 1981 to 1983 ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orwell Prize
The Orwell Prize is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity (Registered Charity No 1161563, formerly "The Orwell Prize") governed by a board of trustees. Four prizes are awarded each year: one each for a fiction (established 2019) and non-fiction book on politics, one for journalism and one for "Exposing Britain's Social Evils" (established 2015); between 2009 and 2012, a fifth prize was awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to "make political writing into an art". In 2014, the Youth Orwell Prize was launched, targeted at school years 9 to 13 in order to "support and inspire a new generation of politically engaged young writers". In 2015, The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain's Social Evils, sponsored and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was launched. The British political theorist Sir Bernard Crick founded The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Murder Of Yvonne Fletcher
The murder of Yvonne Fletcher, a Metropolitan Police officer, occurred on 17 April 1984, when she was fatally wounded by a shot fired from the Libyan embassy on St James's Square, London, by an unknown gunman. Fletcher had been deployed to monitor a demonstration against the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and died shortly afterwards. Her death resulted in an eleven-day siege of the embassy, at the end of which those inside were expelled from the country and the United Kingdom severed diplomatic relations with Libya. Between 1980 and 1984 Gaddafi had ordered the deaths of several exiled opponents of his regime; bombings and shootings, targeted at Libyan dissidents, occurred in Manchester and London. Five Libyans thought to be behind the attacks were deported from the UK. During the anti-Gaddafi protest on 17 April 1984, two gunmen opened fire from the first floor of the embassy with Sterling submachine guns. In addition to the murder of Fletcher, eleven Libyan demonstrators ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Regents Park Mosque
The London Central Mosque (also known as the Regent's Park Mosque) is an Islamic place of worship located on the edge of Regent's Park in central London. Design and location It was designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd, completed in 1977, and has a prominent golden dome. The main hall can accommodate over 5,000 male worshippers, with women praying on a balcony overlooking the hall. The mosque holds a chandelier and a vast carpet, with very little furniture. The inside of the dome is decorated with sacred geometry in the Islamic tradition and has small stained glass windows around its base, containing turquoise coloured 16-pointed stars. There is also a small bookshop and halal café on the premises. The mosque is joined to the Islamic Cultural Centre (ICC) which was officially opened by King George VI in 1944. The land was donated by George VI to the Muslim community of Britain in return for the donation of land in Cairo by King Farouk of Egypt and Sudan on which to build ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States, the ''Times'' serves as one of the country's Newspaper of record, newspapers of record. , ''The New York Times'' had 9.13 million total and 8.83 million online subscribers, both by significant margins the List of newspapers in the United States, highest numbers for any newspaper in the United States; the total also included 296,330 print subscribers, making the ''Times'' the second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States, following ''The Wall Street Journal'', also based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' is published by the New York Times Company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, whose current chairman and the paper's publ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust Limited. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of ''The Guardian'' in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of ''The Guardian'' free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for ''The Guardian'' the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in its journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Lucy Angela Hughes-Hallett (born 7 December 1951) is a British cultural historian, biographer and novelist. In November 2013, she won the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction for her biography of the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, ''The Pike''. The book also won the 2013 Costa Book Award (Biography) and the Duff Cooper Prize. Her most recent book is ''The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham''. Biography Lucy Hughes-Hallett has written four works of nonfiction: ''Cleopatra'', ''Heroes'', ''The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio'', and ''The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham''. She has also written a novel, ''Peculiar Ground'', set partly in the 1660s and partly during the Cold War. In her collection of short stories, ''Fabulous'', she reimagines stories from classical mythology, the Bible, and folklore, setting them in modern Britain. Hughes-Hallett was a Vogue Talent Contest prizewinner in 1973 and subsequently worked for five ye ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
