Discussing the growing prominence of diasporic Arab literature in languages other than Arabic, Hilary Kilpatrick refers to ‘those scattered works which cannot even be organised into a minority tradition because there are so few of them’. Such applies, in the Libyan tradition, to the writing of both Hisham Matar (b.1970) in English and Kamal Ben Hameda (b.1954) in French. In the past decade, both authors, and particularly Matar, have risen to prominence, recognised for their literary depictions of Libya, and becoming two of the country's most recognised voices. In view of Libya’s large diaspora, their numbers will undoubtedly also grow in coming years, raising the question, as Kilpatrick frames it, as to what writings they can be meaningfully related and, specifically, what Nouri Gana calls their ‘“hidden affinities” with Arabic literary traditions’.

Both Ben Hameda's La compagnie des Tripolitaines (2011; Under the Tripoli Sky, 2013) and Matar's In the Country of Men (2006) take childhood as their starting-point, setting them, on the one hand, within the ranks of canonical, diasporic and postcolonial Bildungsroman such as Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaaba (1986; Shantytown Kid, 2007), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) and Khaled Husseini's The Kite Runner (2003). On the other hand, their local aesthetics are manifestly clear. Conveying the palpable heat and dazzling sunlight of boyhood summers, their novels are anchored in childhood bewilderment, steeped in folklore and Qurʾanic spirituality, and constructed around curtailed comings-of-age. Interwoven with the intimate memories of older relatives, they are framed by wider, creaturely perspectives on the land and its inhabitants.