Tuesday, June 10, 2025
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. (GMT+01:00) Rome
Location: Villa Malta (Rome) La Sala
Modern literature originated in the West’s secular Enlightenment and became progressively preoccupied with the fate of the individual. Have writers from the non-Western world been able to expand its concerns by invoking their own literary and spiritual traditions, from Sufism to Buddhism, and the long histories of cultural pluralism and religious tolerance in Asia and Africa? Or have they too often suppressed those traditions in order to accommodate themselves to the dominant Western notions of literature and conceptions of the good life and society?
Participants
Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid is an acclaimed British Pakistani author known for creative fiction and commentary that address contemporary global issues. His recent novels include The Last White Man (2022) and Exit West (2017), which received the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His book The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and later adapted into a successful film. Hamid’s engagement with themes of political turmoil, cultural displacement, and shifting individual and collective identities informs his influential essays on contemporary affairs in leading outlets including the Guardian, New York Times, and Paris Review.
Kamila Shamsie
Kamila Shamsie is the author of six novels, most recently Home Fire (2017) and A God in Every Stone (2014), which was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, as well Burnt Shadows (2009) and In the City by the Sea (1998). Her novels have been translated into more than 25 languages, and three have won awards from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. In 2013 Shamsie was named one of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists.” She grew up in Pakistan, studied in the United States, is based in London, and is now serving as writer in residence at Georgetown University in Qatar.
Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote is an Indian poet, theorist, and curator whose influential work centers on the complex history and presence of cultural pluralism from the local to the global. He has authored eight books of poetry—including Icelight (2022), Jonahwhale (2018), and a translation of a fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic-poet, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd (2011)—and the acclaimed 2012 book Confluences: Forgotten Histories between East and West (with Ilija Trojanow). Hoskote has curated more than 50 showcases of Indian and global art over the past three decades, including India’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Accessibility
Please email globaldialogues@georgetown.edu by June 2 with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.