Mohsin Hamid
Encyclopedia
Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistan
i author best known for his novels Moth Smoke
(2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist
(2007).
. He then moved with his family back to Lahore
, Pakistan and attended the Lahore American School
.
At the age of 18, Hamid returned to the United States to continue his education. He graduated from Princeton University
summa cum laude in 1993, having studied under such writers as Joyce Carol Oates
and Toni Morrison
. Hamid wrote the first draft of his first novel for a fiction workshop taught by Morrison. He returned to Pakistan after college to continue working on it.
Hamid then attended Harvard Law School
, graduating in 1997. Finding corporate law boring, he repaid his student loans by working for several years as a management consultant
at McKinsey & Company
in New York City. He was allowed to take three months off each year to write, and he used this time to complete his first novel Moth Smoke
.
He moved to London in the summer of 2001, initially intending to stay only one year. Although he frequently returned to Pakistan to write, he continued to live in London for eight years, becoming a dual citizen of the United Kingdom in 2006. He moved to Lahore in 2009 with his wife Zahra and their daughter Dina.
He now divides his time between Pakistan and abroad, living between Lahore, New York, London, and Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Greece. Hamid has described himself as a "mongrel" and has said of his own writing that "a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself."
, told the story of a marijuana-smoking ex-banker in post-nuclear-test Lahore who falls in love with his best friend's wife and becomes a heroin addict. It was published in 2000, and quickly became a cult hit in Pakistan and India. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award given to the best first novel in the US, and was adapted for television in Pakistan and as an operetta in Italy.
Moth Smoke had an innovative structure, using multiple voices, second person trial scenes, and essays on such topics as the role of air-conditioning in the lives of its main characters. Pioneering a hip, contemporary approach to South Asian fiction, it was considered by some critics to be "the most interesting novel that came out of [its] generation of subcontinent writing." In the New York Review of Books, Anita Desai
noted:
His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
, told the story of a Pakistani man who decides to leave his high-flying life in America after a failed love affair and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It was published in 2007 and became an international best seller, reaching No.4 on the New York Times Best Seller list
. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
, won several awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award, and was translated into over 25 languages. The Guardian
selected it as one of the books that defined the decade.
Like Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist was formally experimentative. The novel used the unusual device of a dramatic monologue
in which the Pakistani protagonist continually addresses an American listener who is never heard from directly. (Hamid has said The Fall by Albert Camus
served as his model.) According to one commentator, because of this technique:
In an interview in May 2007, Hamid said of the brevity of The Reluctant Fundamentalist: "I’d rather people read my book twice than only half-way through."
Hamid has also written on politics, art, literature, travel, and other topics. His journalism, essays, and stories have appeared in TIME, The Guardian
, Dawn
, The New York Times
, The Washington Post
, The International Herald Tribune, the Paris Review
, and other publications.
Source: British Council website
Interviews
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
i author best known for his novels Moth Smoke
Moth Smoke
Moth Smoke is a novel written by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2000. It tells the story of Darashikoh Shezad, a banker in Lahore, Pakistan, who loses his job, falls in love with his best friend's wife, and plunges into a life of drugs and crime...
(2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.The novel uses the technique of a frame story, which takes place during the course of a single evening in an outdoor Lahore cafe, where a bearded Pakistani man called Changez tells a nervous American stranger about his love...
(2007).
Biography
Hamid spent part of his childhood in the United States, where he stayed from the age of 3 to 9 while his father, a university professor, was enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford UniversityStanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
. He then moved with his family back to Lahore
Lahore
Lahore is the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab and the second largest city in the country. With a rich and fabulous history dating back to over a thousand years ago, Lahore is no doubt Pakistan's cultural capital. One of the most densely populated cities in the world, Lahore remains a...
, Pakistan and attended the Lahore American School
Lahore American School
Lahore American school is a private school based in Lahore, Pakistan.-About LAS:The Lahore American School is an independent co-educational day school which offers an educational program from preschool through grade 12 for students of all nationalities...
.
At the age of 18, Hamid returned to the United States to continue his education. He graduated from Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
summa cum laude in 1993, having studied under such writers as Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction...
and Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved...
. Hamid wrote the first draft of his first novel for a fiction workshop taught by Morrison. He returned to Pakistan after college to continue working on it.
Hamid then attended Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
, graduating in 1997. Finding corporate law boring, he repaid his student loans by working for several years as a management consultant
Management consulting
Management consulting indicates both the industry and practice of helping organizations improve their performance primarily through the analysis of existing organizational problems and development of plans for improvement....
at McKinsey & Company
McKinsey & Company
McKinsey & Company, Inc. is a global management consulting firm that focuses on solving issues of concern to senior management. McKinsey serves as an adviser to many businesses, governments, and institutions...
in New York City. He was allowed to take three months off each year to write, and he used this time to complete his first novel Moth Smoke
Moth Smoke
Moth Smoke is a novel written by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2000. It tells the story of Darashikoh Shezad, a banker in Lahore, Pakistan, who loses his job, falls in love with his best friend's wife, and plunges into a life of drugs and crime...
.
He moved to London in the summer of 2001, initially intending to stay only one year. Although he frequently returned to Pakistan to write, he continued to live in London for eight years, becoming a dual citizen of the United Kingdom in 2006. He moved to Lahore in 2009 with his wife Zahra and their daughter Dina.
He now divides his time between Pakistan and abroad, living between Lahore, New York, London, and Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Greece. Hamid has described himself as a "mongrel" and has said of his own writing that "a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself."
Work
Hamid's first novel, Moth SmokeMoth Smoke
Moth Smoke is a novel written by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2000. It tells the story of Darashikoh Shezad, a banker in Lahore, Pakistan, who loses his job, falls in love with his best friend's wife, and plunges into a life of drugs and crime...
, told the story of a marijuana-smoking ex-banker in post-nuclear-test Lahore who falls in love with his best friend's wife and becomes a heroin addict. It was published in 2000, and quickly became a cult hit in Pakistan and India. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award given to the best first novel in the US, and was adapted for television in Pakistan and as an operetta in Italy.
Moth Smoke had an innovative structure, using multiple voices, second person trial scenes, and essays on such topics as the role of air-conditioning in the lives of its main characters. Pioneering a hip, contemporary approach to South Asian fiction, it was considered by some critics to be "the most interesting novel that came out of [its] generation of subcontinent writing." In the New York Review of Books, Anita Desai
Anita Desai
Anita Mazumdar Desai is an Indian novelist and Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
noted:
One could not really continue to write, or read about, the slow seasonal changes, the rural backwaters, gossipy courtyards, and traditional families in a world taken over by gun-running, drug-trafficking, large-scale industrialism, commercial entrepreneurship, tourism, new money, nightclubs, boutiques... Where was the Huxley, the Orwell, the Scott Fitzgerald, or even the Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, or Brett Easton Ellis to record this new world? Mohsin Hamid's novel Moth Smoke, set in Lahore, is one of the first pictures we have of that world.
His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.The novel uses the technique of a frame story, which takes place during the course of a single evening in an outdoor Lahore cafe, where a bearded Pakistani man called Changez tells a nervous American stranger about his love...
, told the story of a Pakistani man who decides to leave his high-flying life in America after a failed love affair and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It was published in 2007 and became an international best seller, reaching No.4 on the New York Times Best Seller list
New York Times Best Seller list
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Man Booker Prize
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and...
, won several awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award, and was translated into over 25 languages. The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
selected it as one of the books that defined the decade.
Like Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist was formally experimentative. The novel used the unusual device of a dramatic monologue
Dramatic monologue
M. H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue as it applies to poetry:-Types of monologues:One of the most important influences on the development of the dramatic monologue is the Romantic poets...
in which the Pakistani protagonist continually addresses an American listener who is never heard from directly. (Hamid has said The Fall by Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
served as his model.) According to one commentator, because of this technique:
maybe we the readers are the ones who jump to conclusions; maybe the book is intended as a Rorschach to reflect back our unconscious assumptions. In our not knowing lies the novel's suspense... Hamid literally leaves us at the end in a kind of alley, the story suddenly suspended; it's even possible that some act of violence might occur. But more likely, we are left holding the bag of conflicting worldviews. We're left to ponder the symbolism of Changez having been caught up in the game of symbolism—a game we ourselves have been known to play.
In an interview in May 2007, Hamid said of the brevity of The Reluctant Fundamentalist: "I’d rather people read my book twice than only half-way through."
Hamid has also written on politics, art, literature, travel, and other topics. His journalism, essays, and stories have appeared in TIME, The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, Dawn
Dawn (newspaper)
Dawn is Pakistan's oldest and most widely read English-language newspaper. One of the country's two largest English-language dailies, it is the flagship of the Dawn Group of Newspapers, published by Pakistan Herald Publications, which also owns the Herald, a magazine, the evening paper The Star and...
, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
, The International Herald Tribune, the Paris Review
Paris Review
The Paris Review is a literary quarterly founded in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton. Plimpton edited the Review from its founding until his death in 2003. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S...
, and other publications.
Honors
- 2000 New York Times Notable Book of the Year: Moth Smoke
- 2001 Betty Trask AwardBetty Trask AwardThe Betty Trask Prize and Awards are for first novels written by authors under the age of 35, who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. The awards were established in 1984 by the Society of Authors, at the bequest of the late Betty Trask, a reclusive author of over thirty romance novels...
: Moth Smoke - 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN AwardHemingway Foundation/PEN AwardThe Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award is awarded annually to a novel or book of short stories by an American author who has not previously published a book of fiction. The award is named after Ernest Hemingway and funded by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, which has been administered by the Hemingway...
(shortlist): Moth Smoke - 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- 2007 New York Times Notable Book of the Year: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- 2008 Ambassador Book AwardAmbassador Book AwardThe Ambassador Book Award is awarded annually by the English Speaking Union. It recognizes important literary works that contribute to the understanding and interpretation of American life and culture. Winners of the award are considered literary ambassadors who provide, in the best contemporary...
of the English Speaking Union: The Reluctant Fundamentalist - 2008 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- 2008 Arts Council England Decibel Award (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- 2008 Asian American Literary Award: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- 2008 Australia-Asia Literary AwardAustralia-Asia Literary AwardAustralia-Asia Literary Award was an initiative of the Government of Western Australia Department of Culture and the Arts. It was one of the richest literary prizes in the region, indeed the world, with a purse of A$110,000. The Award was established in 2007. The first and only winner was...
(shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist - 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- 2008 Index on CensorshipIndex on CensorshipIndex on Censorship is a campaigning publishing organisation for freedom of expression, which produces an award-winning quarterly magazine of the same name from London. The present chief executive of Index on Censorship, since 2008, is the author, broadcaster and commentator John Kampfner, former...
T R Fyvel Award (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist - 2008 James Tait Black Memorial PrizeJames Tait Black Memorial PrizeFounded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
(for fiction) (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist - 2008 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary AwardInternational IMPAC Dublin Literary AwardThe International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is an international literary award for a work of fiction, jointly sponsored by the city of Dublin, Ireland and the company IMPAC. At €100,000 it is one of the richest literary prizes in the world...
(shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist - 2009 Premio Speciale Dal Testo Allo Schermo: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Source: British Council website
External links
OfficialInterviews