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Hamid LMT - Poetry by Hamid, page 3 transcendingtouch.com |
Mohsin Hamid (born 1971) is a Pakistani author best known for his novels Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).
[edit] BiographyHamid 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 with his wife Zahra and their daughter Dina. 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] WorkHamid's first novel, Moth Smoke, 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.[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 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."[9] 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 #4 on the New York Times Best Seller list.[11] The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won several awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was translated into over 20 languages. 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:
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."[13] Hamid has also written on politics, art, literature, travel, and other topics. His journalism, essays, and stories have appeared in Time, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, The Washington Post,[14] The International Herald Tribune,[15] the Paris Review, and other publications. [edit] Bibliography
[edit] Honors
Source: British Council website[16] [edit] Footnotes
[edit] References
[edit] External linksOfficial Interviews | |||||||||||||||||||||
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