Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West shortlisted for National Book Critics Circle Awards

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Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid on the set of the film version of his ‘Reluctant Fundamentalist’ in Old Delhi (the Indian city is filling in for Lahore, where the book is set, but which was deemed too dangerous for the shoot). STEPHANIE NOLEN

Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel Exit West has recently been shortlisted by top US Book critics’ awards, National Book Critics Circle, for the 2017 awards for fiction.

Exit West highlights the issues of emigration and refugee crisis and has Alice McDermott’s The Ninth House, Joan Silber’s Improvement, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy, with it in the competition.

The awards will take place on March 15 at the New School in New York City.

The prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards began in 1975 and are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of over 1,000 working critics and book review editors.

This is not the only shortlisting that ‘Exit West’ has accomplished. Hamid’s fourth novel was even shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize.

Hamid’s acclaimed novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was also shortlisted for the Nobel Prize prize in 2007.

Mohsin Hamid has written four novels till date, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West, and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations.

He was born in Lahore; however, he spent most of his life in New York, California and London.