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Mohsin Hamid (Urdu: محسن حامد; born 23 July 1971) is a British Pakistani novelist, writer and brand consultant. His novels are Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Exit West (2017), and The Last White Man (2022).
Aug 23, 2022 · Following the 11 September terror attacks, Mohsin Hamid’s experience of travelling changed dramatically. In 2001 the novelist was 30 and had lived in the West for 18 years. Yet as a brown-skinned Pakistani man with a Muslim name flying between London and New York, he would be questioned by airport staff and searched extensively.
Mohsin Hamid was born in 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan, and moved to the US at the age of 18 to study at Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He then worked as a management consultant in New York, and later as a freelance journalist back in Lahore.
- Lahore, Pakistan
- Hamish Hamilton Ltd
- The Post-9/11 World
- Profound Shift
- The Nature of Migration
- Questioning Identity
- Trying Not to Be Seen
- An Optimistic Outlook
"Changez, the main character in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is doing very well in America. He's arrived from Pakistan to go to university there. He gets a high-paying job. He finds a girlfriend. And he's loving life in New York City. After September 11, 2001 and the terrorist attacks, he begins to question whether he should be there — whether he ...
"After September 11th, there was just this kind of shock as to why people were suspicious of me. And of course, I knew why they were suspicious of me. But it still felt strange to go to the airport that I had been to many times before and suddenly be pulled out of the line to be searched. "I didn't know exactly what I'd lost. And it struck me that ...
"I think that migration has long been a safety valve for our species, like as is for any species. If an animal like a polar bear finds that it's getting too warm, they'll try to go to a place that's colder. If a bird finds that there's a lack of food, it will fly to a place where there's more food. "And people, at the end of the day, will seek out ...
"I think that our notion of reality is in fact at least partially a fiction. What we think of as real is not in fact real. "When we think about who we are, we imagine the story that we tell about ourselves: 'This is who I am, this is how I live, and the kind of person I am.' This is only a very partial representation of what we actually are. "The c...
"So Anders goes into the world with this very strange feeling. He feels he is still Anders and he wants to be seen as Anders. He doesn't want to be seen as somebody else. He is both trying to not be seen in this new way — and also trying not to see other people seeing him in this new way. "So there's a degree of trying to conceal himself that he be...
"It is absolutely the case that I've tried in both Exit West and The Last White Man to embed a sense of optimism, particularly toward the end of these books. I think that's important, not because the reader will necessarily feel optimistic. But for me, it's very important to put that in there — to offer the possibility of optimism. "I think it's ve...
On his new book, The Last White Man, why he likes to skew the sense of reality, how his work explores variations on love, and why the form of the novel has new potential. The Last White...
- Nawaid Anjum
Jul 28, 2022 · An Italian woman suggested a slender novel by her compatriot, Antonio Tabucchi. It was set in Lisbon, a port city of rolling hills on the western edge of a continent, at a time when Europe was...
Jul 26, 2022 · T he opening of Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man, arriving Aug. 2, invokes Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa—but with a metamorphosis fitting for the racially charged era in which we live. “One ...
