Riz Ahmed & Mohsin Hamid: Migration and Magic
At our 2018 London Literature Festival we welcomed author Mohsin Hamid, and actor Riz Ahmed – who starred in the film adaptation of Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist – to discuss how art and the novel can reflect a rapidly changing world
From Homer’s The Odyssey to more modern texts, such as Hamid’s Exit West, stories of migration and displacement ran through the core of our 2018 London Literature Festival. As the Southbank Centre Literature Programmer, Debo Amon, explains in his introduction to this podcast, migration has always been a part of human experience, and can often be a physical manifestation of hope.
In this exclusive podcast of their appearance here at the Southbank Centre, Hamid and Ahmed join writer and journalist Kieran Yates to reflect on why stories of migration have captivated our imaginations, and why the hope they bring is often necessary in dark times.
‘I think migration is the basic nature of what it is to be human’
Mohsin Hamed