Mohsin Hamid (English: Mohsin Hamid, Urdu: محسن حمید) is a Pakistani and British writer. He is primarily known for his novels such as: “Smoke Moth” (2000), “The Forced Fundamentalist” (2007), “How to Get Rich as Hell in Rising Asia” (2013), “Escape to the West” (2017).
He was born on July 23, 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan. From the age of three to nine, he lived in the United States, where his father, a university professor, was pursuing his PhD at Stanford University. After that, the family returned to Lahore, where Hamid studied at the Lahore American School.
At the age of eighteen, Hamid moved to the United States to pursue higher education. In 1993, he graduated “with the highest honors” from Princeton University, where his writing teachers were Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. Hamid began work on his first novel during a seminar taught by Morrison. When he returned to Pakistan, he continued working on the book.
In 1997, Hamid attended Harvard Law School. He found corporate law uninteresting, so for several years he worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company to pay off his student debts. He took three months of vacation a year to finish his debut novel, Smoky Moth (2000). Since then, four more novels have been published: “The Forced Fundamentalist” (2007), “How to Get Damn Rich in Rising Asia” (2013), “Discontent and Civilization: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London (2014), and Escape to the West (2017).
In 2001, Hamid moved to London, planning to stay there for one year. Although he often traveled to Pakistan, he lived in London for eight years and became a British citizen in 2006. In 2004, he joined the consulting firm Wolff Olins, where he worked three days a week to have time for his writing career. He was later promoted to general manager of Wolff Olins’ London office, and in 2015 became the chief executive responsible for narrative writing.
Hamid has written on politics, art, literature, travel, including an Op-Ed piece on Pakistan’s internal divisions and extremism for the New York Times. His journalism, essays and short stories have appeared in the following publications: “TIME, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, Paris Review, etc. In 2013, he was included in the list of “One Hundred Leading Thinkers of the World” according to the magazine “Forbes”.