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Novel Study Guides: Reluctant Fundamentalist

Cover

Image result for the reluctant fundamentalist book cover

Themes

  • Pakistanis in the United States
  • Racism
  • Self-perception
  • United States - Race relations
  • Film of the book
  • Asia
  • Discovery

Teacher / student resources

Library resources

About the Author

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. 

His first novel was Moth Smoke (2000), winner of a Betty Trask Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Moth Smoke was made into a television mini-series in Pakistan and an operetta in Italy, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000.

In 2007 his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was published and shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In 2008, it won the South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature and was shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) and the 2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). A short story based on the novel was also published in The Paris Reviewin 2006.

Hamid's third novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) won the Tiziano Terzani International Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the KLF Embassy of France Prize and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt International Literature Award. His fourth novel, Exit West (2017), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has also published a book of essays entitled Discontent and Its Civilisations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York & London (2014). 

Mohsin Hamid now lives in London. [British Council]

Further reading

Awards

  • Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year - 2007
  • Ambassador Book Awards - 2008
  • New York Times Notable Books of the Year - 2007
  • Nominated: Commonwealth Writers Prize - 2008
  • Nominated: Benjamin Franklin Award - 2008 
  • Nominated: International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - 2009 
  • Shortlisted: Man Booker Prize - 2007 

Summary

The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Mohsin Hamid in Conversation with Akhil Sharma

Mohsin Hamid on the art of writing and the future for the 'West' and the 'East'

Q&A Highlight - Mohsin Hamid on 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'