On April 15, 2023, Hisham Matar, Professor of Professional Practice in English and Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, published his new novella, The Boys: An Adventure, which follows a group of boys in an unnamed city on the southern Mediterranean coast. Their daily lives and adventures are set against an impending state of unrest. The novella began as a two-year text conversation between Matar and artist David Austen. Hisham would send a text of a few lines and David would reply with a drawing, then Hisham would write another passage, and so on, until a fictional narrative began to emerge. Two years later, this correspondence has formed Matar’s completed novella and Austen’s suite of gouache drawings. An exhibition bringing the two together for the first time will be on display at Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland, until June 10, 2023.