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Mohsin Hamid

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Mohsin Hamid

Born 1971
Lahore, Pakistan
Occupation Novelist
Nationality  Pakistan,  United Kingdom
Writing period 2000-present
Official website

Mohsin Hamid (born 1971) is a Pakistani author best known for his novels Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).

Contents

[edit] 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 University. He then moved with his family back to Lahore, Pakistan and attended the Lahore American School.[1]

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.[2]

Hamid then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1997.[3] 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.[4]

He moved to London in the summer of 2001, intending to stay only one year. Although he frequently returned to Pakistan to write, he continues to live in London, where he works part-time as a consultant. He became a dual citizen of the United Kingdom in 2006.[5]

Hamid has described himself as a "transcontinental mongrel"[6] and has said of his own writing that "a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself."[7]

[edit] Work

Hamid's first novel, Moth Smoke, told the story of a heroin addict and down-and-out adulterer in contemporary Lahore. It was published in 2000 worldwide in 10 languages. It won a Betty Trask Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. It was also adapted for television in Pakistan and as an operetta in Italy.[8]

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 the main characters. The novel was recognized for marking the birth of a new generation of gritty, modern South Asian fiction. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Anita Desai 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.[9]

His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, told the story of a Pakistani man who decides to leave America. It was published in 2007 worldwide in 20 languages. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won several international awards including the Anisfield Wolf Award. A short story based on the novel, called "Focus on the Fundamentals", was published in the Fall 2006 issue of the Paris Review. In an interview in May 2007, he said of the brevity of The Reluctant Fundamentalist: "I’d rather people read my book twice than only half-way through."[10]

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. 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... Changez's verbose explanations invite multiple, clashing interpretations; though we can't hear or see the American, we sense his tension. 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.[11]

Hamid has also written on politics, art, literature, travel, and other topics. His journalism and essays have appeared in Time, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, The Washington Post,[12] The International Herald Tribune,[13] and other publications.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Honors

Source: British Council website[14]

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ "Mohsin Hamid: A Muslim novelist's eye on U.S. and Europe" International Herald Tribune 12 October 2007
  2. ^ "Why I Write: Mohsin Hamid" The Guardian 6 June 2008
  3. ^ "A Novel Idea" Harvard Law Bulletin Summer 2000
  4. ^ "Akhil and Mohsin Get Paid" The New York Observer 22 April 2001
  5. ^ "Mohsin Hamid on citizenship" The Independent 25 February 2007
  6. ^ "The Pathos of Exile" TIME 18 August 2003
  7. ^ "My Reluctant Fundamentalist" Powells Original Essays
  8. ^ Anisfield-Wolf Award citation
  9. ^ Desai, Anita. "Passion in Lahore," New York Review of Books, December 21, 2000.
  10. ^ "10 Questions". Outlook India. http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20070514&fname=ADen+Questions&sid=1. 
  11. ^ Kerr, Sarah. "In the Terror House of Mirrors," New York Review of Books, October 11, 2007.
  12. ^ "Why do they hate us?" Washington Post 22 July 2007
  13. ^ "Flailing, But Not Yet Failing" The International Herald Tribune 18 March 2009
  14. ^ Contemporarywriters.com entry on Mohsin Hamid

[edit] References

  • article (in Italian). Accessed March 4, 2007
  • Houpt, S.: "Novelist by Night", The Globe and Mail, April 1, 2000
  • Patel, V.: "A Call to Arms for Pakistan", Newsweek, July 24, 2000

[edit] External links

Official

Interviews

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohsin_Hamid"
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