Hisham Matar was born in New York City. He spent his childhood in America with his Libyan parents while his father was working for the Libyan delegation to the United Nations. When he was three years old, his family went back to Tripoli, Libya, where he spent his early childhood. Due to political persecutions by the Gaddafi regime, in 1979 his father was accused of being a reactionary to the Libyan revolutionary regime and was forced to flee the country with his family. They lived in exile in Egypt where Hisham and his brother completed their schooling in Cairo.In 1986 he moved to London, United Kingdom, where he continued his studies and received a degree in architecture. In 1990, while he was still in London, his father, a political dissident, was kidnapped in Cairo. He has been reported missing ever since. However, in 1996, the family received two letters with his father's handwriting stating that he was kidnapped by the Egyptian secret police, handed over to the Libyan regime, and imprisoned in the notorious Abu Salim prison in the heart of Tripoli. Since that date, there has been little information about his father's whereabouts. In 2010 Matar reported that he had received news that his father had been seen alive in 2002 indicating that he had survived a 1996 massacre of 1200 political prisoners by the Libyan authorities.

Hisham Matar began writing poetry and experimented in theatre. He began writing his first novel In the Country of Men in early 2000. In the autumn of 2005, the publishers Penguin International signed a two-book deal with him, and the novel was a huge success.

His first novel, In the Country of Men, was published in July 2006 and received accolade from such notable figures as J M Coetzee, Anne Michaels and Nadeem Aslam. It went on to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize., and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2006. It has won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book award for Europe and South Asia, the 2007 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Italian Premio Vallombrosa Gregor von Rezzori, the Italian Premio Internazionale Flaiano (Sezione Letteratura) and the inaugural Arab American Book Award. "In the Country of Men" has been translated into 22 languages.

In 2008 Hisham Matar became the Mary Amelia Cummins Harvey Visiting Fellow Commoner at Girton College, University of Cambridge, England.

According to Guardian.co.uk Hisham's father who caught in 1990, and these are few words of him talking about the incident:In March 1990, Egyptian secret service agents abducted my father from his home in Cairo. For the first two years they led us to believe that he was being held in Egypt, and told us to keep quiet or else they could not guarantee his safety. In 1992 my father managed to smuggle out a letter. A few months later my mother held it in her hand. His careful handwriting curled tightly on to itself to fit as many words as possible on the single A4 sheet of paper. Words with hardly a space between, above or beneath them. No margins, they run to the brink.