Quote by Hisham Matar: “Grief, I now know, is not a project with a conclusion.”

We often treat grief as something to work through and finish, as if there's a point at which you should be done. But grief for someone truly loved doesn't end — it changes shape. Knowing this isn't despair; it's a kind of permission to carry your losses without feeling broken for still feeling them.

Matar published The Return in 2016, twenty years after his father Jaballa was taken by Libyan intelligence forces. Libya was still in turmoil following the fall of Gaddafi in 2011, and the book's account of a family's decades-long grief and uncertainty resonated with millions displaced by the Arab Spring uprisings.

Libyan-British novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2017 for The Return, a memoir about searching for his father who disappeared into Gaddafi's prisons. His novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006.