In the novel “The Last White Man” the protagonist suddenly wakes up as someone else – or does he? Pakistani-British writer Mohsin Hamid on identity, the construct of race and the privacy of the imagination.
Interviewed by
Tobias Mater
“One morning, Anders, a white male, woke up to find that his skin had turned an undeniable deep brown.” Mohsin Hamid’s new novel The Last White Man begins in a similar way to Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Hamid, born in Lahore in 1971, studied at the elite US universities of Princeton and Harvard, worked in New York and lived in London. He has now flown in to the Frankfurt Book Fair from Lahore, where he lives with his wife and two children. A conversation at the edge of the hustle and bustle with a writer who is at home in several worlds.