Rawi Hage – författare

Our unnamed narrator has left his Middle-Eastern home and settled in a chilly, western city. He lives as an exile, untrusted, unwanted, foreign. A stranger trying to make sense of a strange land. But he brings with him secrets - of a family tragedy that he failed to prevent and a childhood overshadowed by war. And as he wanders snowy streets, falling in love with fellow exile Shoreh, he realizes that to find a place in this alien world it is necessary to become someone else. Someone he never dared to be in his past life . . .

Carnival is a new novel from IMPAC Literary Award winner Rawi Hage.WINNER OF THE PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN PRIZE FOR FICTIONThere are two types of taxi driver in the Carnival city - the spiders and the flies. The spiders sit and stew in their cars, waiting for the calls to come to them. But the flies are wanderers - they roam the streets, looking for the raised flags of hands.Fly is a wanderer and from the seat of his taxi we see the world in all of its carnivalesque beauty and ugliness. We meet criminals, prostitutes, madmen, magicians, and clowns of many kinds. We meet ordinary people going to extraordinary places, and revolutionaries just trying to find something to eat. With all of the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made his first two novels international publishing sensations, Carnival gives us Rawi Hage at his searing best. By turns outrageous, hilarious, sorrowful, and stirring, Carnival is a tour de force that will make all of life's passengers squirm in their comfortable, complacent backseats.Praise for Rawi Hage:'A large and unsettling talent' Guardian'Searing, affecting, misanthropic. I'm not from Lebanon and I don't live in Canada, but Cockroach managed to take me to where I come from and where I live now more powerfully than anything I've read in a long while' Mohsin Hamid'The best novel I read this year was Rawi Hage's Cockroach. A dark book, narrated with verve and brilliance. It made me jump for joy' Colm Tóibín, GuardianRawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s. He emigrated to Canada in 1992 and now lives in Montreal. His first novel, De Niro's Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world in a given year, and has either won or been shortlisted for seven other major awards and prizes. Cockroach was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

De Niro's Game is the stunning winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the very first novel by up-and-coming Lebanese literary star Rawi Hage, also author of Cockroach.Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown up on the Christian side of war-torn Beirut. Now on the verge of adulthood, they must choose their futures: to remain in the exhausted, corrupt city of their birth, or to go into exile abroad, cut off from the only existence they have known.Bassam chooses one path - obsessed with leaving Beirut, he embarks on a series of petty crimes to fund his escape to the West. Meanwhile, George amasses power in the underworld of the city, embracing a life of military service, organised crime, killing, and drugs. But their two paths inevitably collide, with explosive consequences. De Niro's Game is Rawi Hage's devastating, timely portrait of two young men and an entire city formed and deformed by war.'A large and unsettling talent' Guardian'A masterpiece . . . writing cannot really get much better' Literary Review'Hollywood noir meets opium dreams in a blasted landscape of war-wasted young lives' Boston Globe'The most subtly nuanced, psychologically compelling book about the corrosive effects of war to be written for a long time . . .The descriptions of the city are so skilful you can taste the dust in the air' Financial TimesRawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. He is the author of De Niro's Game, which won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; Cockroach, which was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize and also listed for various other prizes; and Carnival, to be published by Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin in April 2013. He lives in Montreal.

Our unnamed narrator has left his Middle-Eastern home and settled in a chilly, western city. He lives as an exile, untrusted, unwanted, foreign. A stranger trying to make sense of a strange land. But he brings with him secrets - of a family tragedy that he failed to prevent and a childhood overshadowed by war. And as he wanders snowy streets, falling in love with fellow exile Shoreh, he realizes that to find a place in this alien world it is necessary to become someone else. Someone he never dared to be in his past life . . .

In Carnival, internationally acclaimed author Rawi Hage takes us into the world of Fly, a taxi driver in a crime-ridden apocalyptic metropolis.Raised in the circus, the son of a golden-haired trapeze artist and a flying-carpet man, Fly sees everything, taking in all of the city’s carnivalesque beauty and ugliness as he roves through its dizzying streets in his taxi. Fly is a reader, too, and when he’s not in his taxi he is at home in the equally dizzying labyrinth of books that fills his tiny apartment. His best friend is Otto, a political activist who’s in and out of jails and asylums, mourning his dead wife and lost foster son. On one otherwise tawdry night Fly meets Mary, a book-loving passenger with a domineering husband. So begins a romance that is, for Fly, a brief glimmer of light amid the shadows and grit of the Carnival city.Along with Otto and Mary, Fly introduces us to madmen and revolutionaries, magicians and prostitutes as he picks them up and drops them off, traveling through a nightmarish town that is—we can’t help but notice—a parable for our own debauched, unjust world.Wildly imaginative and darkly ironic, Carnival is a magnificent achievement.

"Funny and sharp ... playful and erotic."-New York Times Book Review

On a ravaged street overlooking a cemetery in a Christian enclave in war-torn 1970s Beirut, we meet Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father dies suddenly, Pavlov is approached by a member of the mysterious Hellfire Society—an anti-religious sect that arranges secret burial for outcasts denied last rites because of their religion or sexuality. Pavlov agrees to take on his father’s work for the society, and over the course of the novel he becomes a survivor-chronicler of his embattled and faded community at the heart of Lebanon’s civil war.

A personal reflection on fragmentation, language, and place.Following one of the Turfan archaeological expeditions in the early 1900s, a fragment of a Manichaean text written in Uighur and Old Turkic found its way to the Asian Art Museum in Berlin. Originating from the Northern Silk Road region (now the Xinjiang Uighur Region in China), these “loose leaves” became a source of inspiration for Rawi Hage. Hage writes, “I was born near Byblos in Lebanon. The ancient city of Byblos is believed to be the place where the first alphabet was invented.” Encountering this rare and precious manuscript, with its layered and multicolored words, Hage reflects on the movement, uprooting, displacement, and migration of both objects and people.