Folio prize goes to Hisham Matar's memoir The Return

A month after it secured him a Pulitzer prize, Hisham Matar’s memoir The Return has won the Rathbones Folio prize.

The Return tells the story of Matar’s journey to his native Libya in search of his missing father, Jaballa, following the fall of Muammar Gadafi’s regime. A businessman and opponent of the dictator, Jaballa was kidnapped in 1990 by security forces. Though never seen by his family again, it was known that he had been taken to the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, where 1,270 prisoners were murdered in 1996. Critical acclaim has followed the memoir, which won the Pulitzer biography prize and was also shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction and the Costa biography award.

Author Ahdaf Soueif, chair of judges, said that the book had hit a nerve with the judges, and crossed the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. “It could have been a novel if we had not known that it was a real story,” she said, adding: “The novelist’s attention to structure and style that had gone into fashioning it delivered a very powerful effect.”

Best known as a novelist, Matar was born in New York, grew up in Tripoli and Cairo, and now lives in England. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the Guardian first book award in 2006. His second, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was published to great acclaim in 2011.

Matar’s memoir emerged as winner from an eight-strong shortlist, evenly split between fiction and nonfiction, including novels such as China Miéville’s The Census Taker and Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, and nonfiction including Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami’s account of the Syrian conflict, Burning Country. Of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, Soueif said: “In a way, the distinction between the two, especially the kind of nonfiction that is being written today, is one that one doesn’t need to be bound by.”

Now awarded to the best work of literature in English, regardless of form, this marks the first year that the £20,000 literary prize has been open to nonfiction. The prize was launched after controversy surrounded the 2011 Man Booker, when the then-chair of judges Stella Rimington said “readability” would top the list of criteria for choosing a winner and that she was looking for a book that would “zip along”. Her comments were perceived by some in the literary world to downplay merit and complexity. At the time, past Booker winner Margaret Atwood said the Folio prize was “much needed in a world in which money is increasingly becoming the measure of all things”.

When it launched, the Folio differed from the Man Booker as it was open to writers from anywhere in the English-speaking world – although the Booker responded a year later by widening its entry criteria to the US as well as the UK, Ireland and Commonwealth countries. This change has led to questions about whether there was need for a second major literary prize. Soueif countered criticism, saying: “The way that the world and the market is now, the more literary prizes there are, the better.”

The Rathbones Folio prize is unusual in that contenders are chosen by an academy of more than 300 distinguised authors. Among them are Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Zadie Smith and William Dalrymple.