The award-winning novelist Mohsin Hamid reflects on storytelling, migration, race and the disorienting but generative experience of living between cultures. Hamid examines how fiction opens imaginative space for empathy and how his own life—shaped by early migrations between Pakistan and the United States—has shaped his literary sensibility.
Hamid describes fiction as uniquely capable of placing readers in a hybrid state of consciousness: “We are alone … and yet the thoughts in our mind are not our own thoughts, they are thoughts from somebody else.” That duality, he argues, creates fertile ground for emotional connection across borders and identities.
Reflecting on his childhood move from Lahore to California, Hamid recounts the month-long silence that preceded his sudden acquisition of fluent English: “I was a child who came to America as a Pakistani child, moved to Pakistan at the age of nine as an American child.” The experience, he explains, left him both hyper-vigilant and deeply attuned to the perspectives of others—an early “proto-novelistic instinct.”
Hamid also discusses how his fiction often introduces a small rupture in reality to illuminate contemporary anxieties. In his novel Exit West (2017), for example, Hamid imagines doors that transport people across borders instantly, a device meant to echo the psychological portals created by technology: “When we stare into them, our consciousness is transported from New York to Pakistan, from Denmark to Mars.”
His latest novel, The Last White Man (2022), takes this disruption a step further by reimagining race as mutable. Hamid situates the book within a longer historical view, noting that racial categories were constructed relatively recently: “This racial system was invented only 600 or 800 years ago—and it will likely not exist 600 years from now.”
Drawing on personal memories of being treated differently in the United States after 9/11, he describes the destabilizing experience of losing an assumed social position: “One day I was the same person, but other people were looking at me as though I had changed.” That dissonance, he suggests, compelled him to examine privilege, complicity, and the fluidity of identity.
Through an exploration of language, belonging, and the imaginative power of literature, Hamid invites viewers to consider how stories might help us navigate an era of rapid change—and how fiction might open new pathways of compassion in a world defined by movement.
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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