“Hamid reaffirms
his place as one of his generation’s most inventive and gifted writers.” — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
CONWAY, Ark. (March 19, 2021) — Mohsin Hamid will visit Hendrix College as a Murphy Visiting Writer on April
8, 2021. He will discuss his writing at 7:30 p.m. in the Hendrix-Murphy Events
channel of the Hendrix Community Events Team. This
event is free and open to the public. Please email hendrix-murphy@hendrix.edu for information on how to join.
An
award-winning author, Hamid is recognized for his four formally inventive
novels that explore multinational identity, immigration, and global politics: Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and Exit West (2017). The Reluctant
Fundamentalist and Exit West have been short-listed for the Man
Booker Prize. He has also published a number of articles on politics and
culture, as well as a book of essays, Discontent
and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London. Hamid
spent much of his childhood in California and his teenage years in his native
Lahore, Pakistan. He then returned to the United States to attend Princeton University,
where he studied creative writing under Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison.
Hamid
has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work. In 2019, Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was
included in BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. The same year, Exit West was listed in Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Novels of
the Decade. Hamid’s writing has been translated into 40 languages, featured on
numerous bestseller lists, and adapted for the cinema.
During
his virtual visit, Hamid will meet with classes and give a public reading. These
students and others will have the chance to meet the real person behind Hamid's
fiction and to discuss the role of imaginative literature in our complex,
fast-changing world.
This event is sponsored by the
Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language, which are
designed to enhance and enrich the study and teaching of literature and
language at Hendrix College. For more information about this and future events,
please contact Henryetta Vanaman, 501-450-4597 or vanaman@hendrix.edu.
Hendrix-Murphy Programs enrich the
study of literature and language for Hendrix College as a whole as well as for
students with intensive interest in those areas. The late Mr. Charles H.
Murphy, Jr., former Chair of the Board of Murphy Oil Corporation and former
member of the Hendrix Board of Trustees, established the Foundation in 1978 in
memory of his mother, Mrs. Bertie Wilson Murphy. A 1905 graduate of Galloway
Women’s College—which later became part of Hendrix College—Mrs. Murphy
possessed a lifelong love of literature and language, to which these programs
are exclusively dedicated.