Uploaded April 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A conversation between Preti Taneja and Alice McCrum at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 04/04/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Award-winning novelist Mohsin Hamid’s newest work, The Last White Man, begins with a premise borrowed from Kafka: one day, his protagonist wakes up to find that he has undergone a transformation overnight. In this case, he has metamorphosed from a white man into a man of color. As similar transformations begin to occur to all white members of his town, the previously fixed social order begins to break down. Disorienting and thought-provoking, the work forces readers to confront the instability of racial identity in contemporary society. Wielding the absurd as a tool for political engagement, Hamid harnesses fiction’s capacity to inspire the imagination in order to propose alternative visions for the world.
About the speaker:
Mohsin Hamid was born in Lahore (Pakistan) in 1971. Known all over the world for The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), he has lived between Pakistan, United-States and London all his life.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
A conversation between Preti Taneja and Alice McCrum at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 04/04/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Award-winning novelist Mohsin Hamid’s newest work, The Last White Man, begins with a premise borrowed from Kafka: one day, his protagonist wakes up to find that he has undergone a transformation overnight. In this case, he has metamorphosed from a white man into a man of color. As similar transformations begin to occur to all white members of his town, the previously fixed social order begins to break down. Disorienting and thought-provoking, the work forces readers to confront the instability of racial identity in contemporary society. Wielding the absurd as a tool for political engagement, Hamid harnesses fiction’s capacity to inspire the imagination in order to propose alternative visions for the world.
About the speaker:
Mohsin Hamid was born in Lahore (Pakistan) in 1971. Known all over the world for The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), he has lived between Pakistan, United-States and London all his life.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
