Rawi Hage
Rawi Hage (* 1964 in Beirut ) is an award-winning Lebanese-Canadian novelist.
Life
Hage grew up in civil war-torn Lebanon as the son of a Maronite and a Greek Orthodox mother who spoke French and Arabic. He cites the poor power supply at the time as a reason why he preferred reading to watching TV. As an adult he emigrated traumatized and worked for several years in New York as an unskilled worker, waiter and taxi driver. Realizing by chance that he was a good photographer, he moved to Montreal to study at Concordia University's Dawson College . He also experimented with writing because he had to enclose text with his photos and by chance found a publisher. For his dark debut "As if there was no tomorrow" (De Niro's Game, 2006), he received the highly endowed IMPAC Award in 2008 . In it, Bassam and his best friend George, a nihilistic militiaman whom everyone just calls De Niro , struggle through the bombed and brutal East Beirut of the early 1980s. In 2008 he wrote the also misanthropic work "Cockroach", set in Montreal, about a protagonist who thinks he is a cockroach person. In 2012 he published "Carnival" about the run-down New York taxi driver Fly, again a reference to De Niro.
Novels
- As if there is no tomorrow. Übers. Gregor Hens Piper, Munich 2010 ISBN 978-3-492-25831-9 , nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
- Cockroach. Translator Gregor Hens. Piper, Munich 2012 ISBN 978-3-492-27363-3
- Feed the spiders. Translator Gregor Hens. Piper, Munich 2013 ISBN 978-3-492-05394-5
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hage, Rawi |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Lebanese-Canadian writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1964 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Beirut |