Mohsin Hamid

Hamid grew up between Lahore and California, where his father pursued a doctorate, before studying at Princeton under Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates and then Harvard Law School. He spent years as a management consultant in New York and London, writing fiction early in the mornings before work, a routine he has said taught him to write in short, disciplined bursts.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), his second novel, is narrated as a single unbroken monologue by a Pakistani man recounting his rise and fall in corporate America to a silent, possibly dangerous American stranger in a Lahore café: a structure that builds dread entirely from what the reader cannot verify. Written in the shadow of 9/11 and its aftermath of suspicion toward Muslim men, it became a bestseller and was adapted into a film.

He has since moved between Lahore, London, and New York, continuing to write shorter, formally inventive novels about migration and identity.