Hisham Matar Wins 2013 Blue Met Arab Prize

Hisham Matar verifies, on Twitter, that this is not a mistake:

The Libyan novelist is indeed the winner of the 2013 Al Madjidi Ibn Dhaher Blue Met Arab Prize, as announced on the Blue Met blog.

Gregory McCormick writes:

When I saw him [Matar] in New York in October as part of the New Yorker Festival, in conversation with a few other big name writers, I knew that our jury had awarded him the prize but was bummed that I couldn’t share it yet because on stage he was fascinating: articulate, funny, dry, intelligent.

The Blue Met Arab Prize is awarded during the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, generally held in April. This award is sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage; last year, it went to Egyptian novelist, activist, and journalist Adhaf Soueif.

Matar will apparently do two events at the Blue Met Festival:

Hisham Matar will do two events at the Festival, an interview with Paul Kennedy (host of Ideas) as well as the awarding of the prize in the evening of Friday, April 26 at Hotel 10, 10 Sherbrooke Street West.

He will also be part of an event on Saturday, April 27: Literature as Refuge, a discussion at the Goethe Institute about the importance that literature has in a time of social, political or personal crisis. This event is with German writer Thomas Pletzinger, Italian Gianrico Carofiglio and Spaniard Ignacio del Valle, hosted by Katia Grubisic.

More about the festival, set this year for April 22 – 28, on the Blue Met website.