Mohammed Hanifਮੁਹੰਮਦ ਹਨੀਫ਼

Early life and the Air Force

Mohammed Hanif was born in Okara, a city in the Punjab province of Pakistan. Published sources do not agree on his birth year, giving 1964 and 1965, so this entry does not settle on one. What is well documented is the unusual road he took into writing. He joined the Pakistan Air Force, studied avionics and navigation at the Pakistan Air Force College in Sargodha, and graduated from the Pakistan Air Force Academy as a pilot officer. He has joked about his own flying ever since, saying he was really good at take-offs but less good at landing a plane safely, and before long he left the service to pursue journalism, the trade that made him a writer.

Journalism in London

Hanif worked as a journalist in Pakistan, writing for Newsline and contributing to the Washington Post and India Today. In 1996 he moved to London to work for the BBC, and he rose to become head of the BBC Urdu service there. London also gave him a second education. He studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and graduated from its Prose Fiction MA in 2005. In 2008, the year his first novel appeared, he moved back to Pakistan, where he later worked as a BBC special correspondent based in Karachi.

What has Mohammed Hanif written?

His first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, was published in 2008. Written in English, it is a dark comic satire built around the real plane crash of 17 August 1988 that killed Pakistan's ruler, General Zia ul-Haq, along with the United States ambassador, Arnold Raphel. The cause of that crash has never been established, and the novel turns the mystery into fiction. Its narrator, Ali Shigri, is an air force pilot who refuses to accept that his father's death was the suicide the authorities describe, and who sets out to avenge him by killing Zia. He is not alone: the book lines up rival plots, from his roommate and an American lieutenant to a crow with a taste for mangoes, and it never confirms which plot, if any, brought the plane down. The title comes from a popular theory that explosives reached the aircraft in a crate of mangoes. The novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Prize, won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, won the Literature Prize at the 2009 Corine International Book Awards, and in 2009 won the overall Best First Book award at the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, chosen from the regional winners. It remains his best known book.

His second novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011), is set in the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments in Karachi and follows Alice Bhatti, a Christian junior nurse whose father is a part-time healer in the French Colony, the city's Christian quarter. Hanif described the book as a love story, while critics also read it as a statement on the lives of religious minorities in Pakistan. It was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize in 2012 and for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2013. A short nonfiction book, The Baloch Who Is Not Missing and Others Who Are, followed in 2013, published by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and concerned with people reported missing in Balochistan.

His third novel, Red Birds (2018), moves the satire to the wars of the present century. An American pilot, Ellie, is sent to bomb a compound his commander insists is full of dangerous men. He crash-lands in the desert on the way, and is rescued by people from the refugee camp he had been sent to bomb. At the centre of the camp story is Momo, a teenager whose elder brother Ali went to work at the American facility known as the Hangar and never came back. The narration rotates between voices, including Momo's dog, Mutt, and a researcher nicknamed Lady Flowerbody who is studying the young Muslim mind. Red Birds was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2019.

Rebel English Academy, his fourth novel

His fourth novel, Rebel English Academy, was published in February 2026. It is set in a fictional town, OK Town, in the turmoil after the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first elected prime minister, when the town erupts in protest under martial law. At its centre is a modest English tuition centre run by Sir Baghi, where a young woman, Sabiha, arrives seeking refuge, while a disgraced intelligence officer, Captain Gul, is sent to OK Town to silence the protests. Reviewing the novel, The Guardian called it a sure-fire Booker contender and said it confirmed his standing as one of South Asia's most unnervingly funny and subversive voices.

Stage, screen and opera

Hanif's writing has never been limited to novels. He wrote the feature film The Long Night (2002), about Karachi, the BBC radio play What Now, Now That We Are Dead?, and the stage play The Dictator's Wife (2008). With the composer Mohammed Fairouz he wrote the libretto for the opera Bhutto, which was commissioned in the United States and premiered with the Pittsburgh Opera in 2019. The same subjects run through all of it: political power, the military, and the city of Karachi, which he has made his fictional home ground.

Writing in English, read in Urdu and Punjabi

Hanif writes his fiction in English, which he has said is his preferred language for fiction, but his journalism runs across languages: he writes regularly for the New York Times, BBC Urdu and BBC Punjabi. That range showed its risks a decade after his first novel appeared. An Urdu translation of A Case of Exploding Mangoes, translated by Syed Kashif Raza, was published in Karachi in September 2019. NPR reported that in January 2020 men who said they were intelligence officials seized about 250 copies from the publisher, Maktaba-e-Danyal, and took lists of the bookshops and distributors stocking it, days after Hanif, the translator and the publisher received a defamation notice from Zia's son, Ijaz-ul-Haq. An intelligence official dismissed the account, NPR reported. Hanif pointed out that the English original had been in print for eleven years without trouble. The English edition stayed on sale throughout, a sign of how differently his two readerships meet the same book.

Honours and later life

In 2018 Hanif was honoured with the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, described by the Pakistan Press Foundation as the third-highest civilian prize in the country. In December 2023, after a long march by Baloch protesters reached Islamabad and was met with a police crackdown, he announced on social media that he was returning the award. In his post he said he was returning it in protest, writing that journalists of his generation had watched Baloch campaigners grow up in protest camps and that he was ashamed to witness a new generation being denied basic dignity.

Hanif is married to the actress Nimra Bucha. His publishers say he splits his time between Berlin and Karachi. Reviewers have repeatedly placed his first novel in the company of Catch-22: the New York Times read it as a satire of militarism, regulation and piety, and the Washington Post compared its comedy to Catch-22 and Philip Roth. Across four novels, a film, plays and an opera, his subjects have stayed constant: military power, religious pressure and the everyday absurdities of life in Pakistan, handled with the same dry humour that took him from an air force cockpit to the head of the BBC Urdu service and then to the front rank of Pakistani novelists.