Mohammed Hanif (Karachi)

What led to the mysterious airplane crash of August 1988, in which Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq, many of his generals, and the U.S. ambassador were killed? Mohammed Hanif, born 1965 in Pakistan and long-time BBC journalist, has created out of this unresolved question a brilliantly narrated and complex satire about men, power and the military, while also revealing the structures and complexities of current global politics. A novel filled with anarchic comedy: Did the CIA or Pakistani military have a hand in it? Was the curse of a blind woman the cause? Or was it a gift from the “All Pakistan Mango Farmers Cooperative”?

Immediately after it was published, the debut novel of the ex-pilot Mohammed Hanif was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2008, and is currently a nominee for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize 2009.

Moderator: Claudia Kramatschek (literary critic, Berlin)

The German text read by: Bastian Trost (Gob Squad, Berlin)

In the series Word Worlds writers come ‘to word’ from all over the world to converse with Berlin audiences on topics ranging from poetry, the spoken word, through to novels and journalistic writing.