During the 2026-2027 Great World Texts in Wisconsin program, high school teachers and students throughout the state will read Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, one of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, finalist for the Booker Prize, and winner of the L.A. Times book prize for fiction.
Exit West is an astonishingly visionary story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands. In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed are cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price.
As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through…Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.
About the Author
Mohsin Hamid was born in 1971 in Lahore. He grew up mostly in Pakistan but spent part of his childhood in California and returned to America to attend Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He then worked in New York and London as a management consultant before returning to Lahore to pursue writing full-time.
He published his first novel, Moth Smoke, in 2000. Structured like a trial, with the reader cast as judge, it told the story of an ex-banker and heroin addict in contemporary Lahore. It became a cult hit, was adapted for television in Pakistan, and was hailed by the New York Review of Books as “one of the first pictures we have of that world,” a new South Asia “taken over by gun-running, drug-trafficking, large-scale industrialism, commercial entrepreneurship, tourism, new money, nightclubs, boutiques.”
His next novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was published in 2007 and recounted a Pakistani man’s encounter with an unnamed stranger as he tells of his abandonment of his high-flying life in New York in a time of conflict and mutual suspicion. The Guardian named it one of the books that defined the decade and the BBC selected it as one of the 100 novels that have shaped our world. It became an international bestseller, and was adapted into a film by director Mira Nair, starring Riz Ahmed, Liev Schreiber, Kate Hudson, and Kiefer Sutherland.
In 2013 he published his third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which was a love story and an exploration of mass-urbanization and global economic transformation — in the apparent guise of a self-help book. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote: “Mr. Hamid reaffirms his place as one of his generation’s most inventive and gifted writers.”
His fourth novel, Exit West, published in 2017, investigated the universality of migration through the story of two refugees fleeing a war-torn city in a world where billions of people have begun to travel through inexplicable black doors. It was an international bestseller described by The New Yorker as “instantly canonical.”
Mohsin’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and many other publications. A book collection of his non-fiction writing, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London was published in 2015.
His writing has been translated into 40 languages and won numerous prizes. He has lectured at dozens of universities around the world, from Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale to the London School of Economics and the National University of Singapore. In 2013, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the world’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers.
Teaching Guide and Resources
Teachers participating in Great World Texts will receive a curricular guide for Exit West and a classroom set of texts for their school’s permanent collection. The curriculum guide contains contextual and lecture materials, suggested readings, close reading and discussion activities, handouts, and suggestions for student projects. This curricular guide is designed to make the text accessible for a range of learners and grade levels and is customizable to meet the needs of a wide range of classrooms and students.
Participating teachers from across the state of Wisconsin also attend a virtual educator colloquium, to be held on Monday, August 17, 2026, which will feature lectures by campus faculty, guidelines for the conference, and community building exercises between educators.
Educators will bring their students to UW-Madison for a full-day conference on Monday, April 5, 2027, where students will present projects created in response to the novel, engage with other students from across the state, and meet author Mohsin Hamid in person. All participating educators received a stipend to fund their school’s participation in Great World Texts. These funds are most often used to offset the costs of substitute teachers and bus travel to Madison for the student conference.
If you have questions, please contact Assistant Director, Public Humanities Programs, Danielle Weindling at greattexts@humanities.wisc.edu.
Please join us for the following special event related to Great World Texts. This event is free and open to all.
Humanities Without Boundaries: Moshin Hamid
Monday, April 5, 2027, from 7:00 to 8:30 PM
Madison Central Public Library, 201 W. Mifflin Street
Presented in partnership with Wisconsin Book Festival. Moderated by B. Venkat Mani, Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities.
In this engaging Humanities Without Boundaries conversation, author Mohsin Hamid will talk about his recent and upcoming works as well as his writing process. Following the conversation, books will be sold on-site by A Room of One’s Own and are available for signing.
2026-2027 Participating Schools
Twenty-two schools from across Wisconsin will engage with Mohsin Hamid’s novel, Exit West:
- Chippewa Falls High School
- Étude High School
- Independence High School
- Madison East High School
- Marquette University High School
- Milwaukee High School of the Arts
- Necedah Area School District
- Shorewood High School
- Oconomowoc High School
- Oshkosh West High School
- Osseo-Fairchild School District
- Rock University High School-RUHS
- SOAR Charter High School
- Totino-Grace High School
- Whitehall Memorial High School
- Whitnall High School
- La Follette High School
- Lake Mills High School
- Wisconsin Connections Academy
- West High School
- Milwaukee School of Languages
- Xavier High School