Hisham Matar’s ‘The Return’ Makes Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2016 Shortlist

The Slightly Foxed First Best Biography Prize 2016 shortlist has been announced, and Hisham Matar’s The Return has made the five-strong list:

Matar’s book might be on any number of specialized shortlists, as it’s all at once memoir, history, biography, and journalistic account of contemporary Libya.

This is the third year that Slightly Foxed, a literary quarterly and independent publisher, has sponsored this award, which is worth £3,500. The other shortlisted titles are:

David Aaronovitch Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists (Jonathan Cape)
David Hare The Blue Touch Paper (Faber)
Juliet Nicolson A House Full of Daughters (Chatto & Windus)
Philippe Sands East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

This year’s judges, according to the prize website, are: biographers Richard Davenport-Hines and Flora Fraser and author Ysenda Maxtone Graham.

Also read:

‘The Return’: Hisham Matar’s Greatest Book So Far

Books Inside Books: An Infinite History of Modern Libya