Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid (born in Lahore in 1971) is a Pakistani novelist who writes in English and holds British citizenship. His work is among the books that helped reshape English-language fiction from South Asia in the early twenty-first century.

He spent part of his childhood in the United States, from age three to nine, while his father, a university lecturer, pursued a doctorate at Stanford. Back in Lahore he attended the Lahore American School, and at eighteen he returned to the United States for college. He graduated from Princeton in 1993 with the highest honours, studying with Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. He wrote the first draft of his debut novel in a fiction workshop taught by Morrison. He then studied law at Harvard, graduating in 1997, but found corporate law dull. To repay his student loans he worked for several years as a consultant at McKinsey in New York, reserving three months a year for writing.

His debut, Moth Smoke (2000), follows a former banker who drifts into drug use in late-twentieth-century Lahore, and it became a cult favourite in Pakistan and India. His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), is a dramatic monologue in which a young Pakistani talks to an American listener who never speaks; Hamid has said Camus's The Fall served as his model. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) uses the second person and the shape of a self-help manual to explore ambition and love amid rapid economic change. Recurring concerns include migration, inequality, divided identity and the tension between the West and the Muslim world, handled in clean prose and inventive structures.

He moved to London in 2001 and lived there for eight years, also working as a brand consultant. Since 2009 he has divided his time between Lahore, New York and London. Exit West (2017), about a couple who escape their city through doors that link distant places, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His legacy lies in offering English-language readers an inside view of contemporary urban Pakistan, though critics have argued that his novels portray Muslim life in a limited way.