Hisham Matar with Diana Matar

George Alagiah was one of the BBC’s most respected journalists. As a proud immigrant, he could see the world from the perspective of the Global South. He was a regular attendee of Hay Festival, and we honour him in this memorial lecture by exploring themes that were close to his heart.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hisham Matar delves into the world of Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the Arab world’s best-known writers. Matar translated and wrote the intro to Mahfouz’s I Found Myself: Last Dreams, a surreal record of his dreams in his final years after an assassination attempt led him to become a recluse.

Diana Matar, the artist whose photographs illustrate the book, shares some of the images which, alongside Hisham Matar’s translation, combine to build a lush and complex picture of Mahfouz’ subconscious.