Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both finalists for the Man Booker Prize, are among Mohsin Hamid's international bestsellers. Moth Smoke, his first novel, won the Betty Trask Prize and was a PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award finalist. His pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and other publications, including a collection of them called Discontent and Its Civilizations. He is based in Pakistan's Lahore.