An interview with Mohammed Hanif

Abstract

Writer and journalist Mohammed Hanif has received much critical acclaim for his debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the inaugural Shakti Bhatt Award, the Corine Prize, and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. Centring on the mysterious death of Pakistan’s military dictator Zia ul‐Haq in 1988, the novel casts a satirical eye over a defining decade in Pakistan’s history. Hanif’s writing spans themes of religion, class anxieties, global politics, masculinity, sexuality, and forms of patriarchy and oppression. His contextualization and representation of Pakistan provide a remarkable insight into how it has come to be the nation that it is today. Hanif was born in Okara in 1964. He graduated from the Pakistan Air Force Academy, but left soon afterwards and became a journalist. He worked for Newsline, The Washington Post and the BBC and headed the BBC Urdu service in London for several years. He also graduated in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He has written several stage and screen plays and now lives in Karachi. This interview was conducted in Karachi, Pakistan, on 22 April 2010.