Read By: Hisham Matar

The 92nd Street Y, New York · Apr 24, 2020 · 28m

Hisham Matar on his selection: In 2016, when I finished writing my book THE RETURN, which chronicles my return to Libya after 33 years of not being able to go there for political reasons, and my failed search for my father, a Libyan political dissident who was imprisoned and made to disappear by the Qaddafi dictatorship, I went to Siena. I spent a month in that Tuscan city looking at paintings from the Sienese School, which covers the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. These paintings have interested me ever since I had first encountered them at the National Gallery in London, some quarter of a…