Hisham Matar Featured in Coronet Inside Out
Coronet Inside Out is a free weekly series of unique artists’ encounters for audiences online, specially created for London’s Coronet Theatre during the COVID-19 closure. Reflecting the theatre’s wide-ranging internationalism and its focus on new work, each artist has conceived their project especially for the Coronet Inside Out series, giving the public a glimpse of the artistic life of this beautiful intimate theatre in London’s Notting Hill Gate.
Hisham Matar will perform a personal reading from his new book "A Month in Siena," a record of looking at paintings from the Sienese School, but also a meditation on loss, love, intimacy and art. In the words of Hisham Matar: "The Sienese School, which sits between the waning influence of the eastern church and before that fabulous activity which we call the Renaissance, was dramatically altered by the 1348 plague, the Black Death. The chapter I will read from, titled 'The Problem with Faith,' looks at how that pandemic changed not only human society, but the imagination itself. Its traces can be perceived even today, perhaps more lucidly during these difficult days of Covid-19."
Hisham Matar won the 2017 Biography Prize for "The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between."