Mohsin Hamid will deliver the Fifth Annual Cheuse Lecture of Ideas

Thursday, April 8, 2027 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Stacy C Sherwood Comm Center, Fairfax VA

The Cheuse Center is looking forward to welcoming Mohsin Hamid to deliver the Fifth Annual Lecture of Ideas. Few writers today fulfill the role of citizen of the world as much as does Mohsin Hamid and create works that raise questions about peoples’ roles in that same world, as well.

A native of Lahore, Pakistan, Hamid spent much of his childhood and early adulthood in New York, attended Princeton and Harvard for his education, and has lived in California, London, and his native Pakistan again. He has developed a wide view of the world’s forces that fought against one another and changed lives as a result while at the same time disrupting basic assumptions about how to navigate life in the world. In his five novels—Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Exit West, and The Last White Man—he dramatized catalyzing events that disrupt the lives his characters are living, often ending those lives and requiring them to build new ones if they are to survive. The novels, along with his journalism and essays, have earned him praise for the power and accuracy of his observations of the present-day world, it’s destabilizing fractures and fissures giving way to ideological rigidness that itself gives way to indifference.

His first novel, Moth Smoke, won a Betty Trask Award, was a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The Reluctant Fundamentalist was a bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; it also was the basis for a movie by the same name. Exit West also was a Booker Prize finalist and bestseller. The Last White Man was long-listed for the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and often is noted for the ways it is similar to Kafka’s Metamorphosis and raises questions about identity.