Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid sees fiction as a way to challenge and destabilize perceptions of reality. “We talk about reality as though it is real, but we are aware that we are creating it”. Through storytelling, Hamid believes, readers can explore the constructed nature of reality and challenge their own assumptions.
Mohsin Hamid discusses his approach to writing, comparing it to the process of digging a well. “Writing for me is like that. You make a void, which is a certain number of hours in a day, where you will do nothing else and you will try to write, often unsuccessfully. But if you keep that time empty, those hours every day, miraculously over a few years, water will come into that hole, and that water will be the novel,” he explains.
Hamid reflects on the evolution of his writing process over the years. While his early novels underwent numerous drafts, he has since refined his approach. “My first two novels each had six or seven drafts over about seven years. Each one very different,” he says. “But now I don’t wind up writing, usually, seven years and seven drafts. It still takes me five or six years, but the process has changed.”
A central theme in Hamid’s work is the role of the reader in shaping a narrative. Discussing his novel ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, he describes how the book intentionally plays with perspective: “When you hear one side of a conversation, you imagine the other side. And so, what begins to happen in that novel is the reader imagines into being half of that novel.” This interplay between writer and reader is, for Hamid, essential to the experience of fiction.
Hamid also elaborates on the significance of form in storytelling, arguing that structure is not an afterthought but an intrinsic part of narrative meaning. “Every story has an appropriate form for that story; that form is essential,” he asserts. He illustrates this point with his novel ‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’, which omits names to allow readers to project their own experiences onto the text. “Things like Pakistan or Islam or Lahore carry with them a sort of pre-branding in the reader’s imagination,” he notes. “By not ever saying Lahore, I was imagining that what if every city was like this?”
Mohsin Hamid was born in 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan. He is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Exit West(2017), and The Last White Man (2022). His work often explores themes of migration, identity, and globalization, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into multiple languages and adapted for film and television.
Eleanor Wachtel interviewed Mohsin Hamid in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival in August 2024 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Cameras: Rasmus Quistgaard
Edit: Astrid Agnes Hald
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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