In the Library’s last Ways of Seeing event, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hisham Matar invites us to slow down and look—patiently, deliberately, without distraction. Together, we will dwell with a single painting — Titian’s Man with a Glove — allowing its details, textures, and silences to emerge over time.
Drawing on the sensibility he brings to A Month in Siena, his luminous meditation on art and the human condition, Matar allows us to explore what happens when we give a work of art our full attention. What can sustained looking reveal about presence, vulnerability, and the passage of time?
About the speaker:
Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. He is the recipient of numerous international prizes, including the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize, the Prix du livre étranger, the Geschwister/Scholl Preis, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and, most recently, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
