Rawi Hage on his novel De Niro's Game
Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of that country\u2019s civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a visual artist, and a curator whose debut novel, De Niro\u2019s Game (2006), was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2006 Governor General\u2019s Award for English fiction. It won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. House of Anansi Press published Rawi\u2019s eagerly anticipated second novel, Cockroach, in 2008. He lives in Montreal where I caught up with him at the Blue Met International Literary Festival.
We talk about living in war conditions, New York, the movie Deer Hunter and Russian roulette, art as memory, the absurdity of war, the dangers of organized religion, fundamentalism, politics and the writer, canoeing and moose, women\u2019s clothing, Arabic poetry and the influence of fathers.
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