World Refugee Awareness Month: Rawi Hage — from Beirut’s Violence to a Voice of Exile

June is Refugee Awareness month. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), released data in June of 2025 that stated over 122 million people—one in every 67 individuals globally—are forcibly displaced. This number has doubled in only the last 10 years. Then, as it is today, Canada is seen around the world as a beacon of hope in their journey toward safety. Every time there is a worldwide crisis, we see people arriving in Calgary with hope in their back pocket.

Today we highlight once such story - Rawi Hage

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Rawi Hage was born in Beirut (1964) and grew up during the Lebanese civil war. After spending part of the 1980s in New York, he relocated to Montreal in the early 1990s and built a career as a novelist, photographer and artist. His debut novel De Niro’s Game (2006) brought him international recognition (it won the 2008 International IMPAC/Dublin Literary Award) and established recurring themes in his work: urban violence, displacement, exile and the uneasy work of memory.

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How his life shaped his books Hage’s fiction often draws directly on wartime Beirut and on the dislocation of migration. De Niro’s Game is set in wartime Beirut and dramatizes the choices young men face there; Cockroach (2008) moves those concerns into a cold, immigrant Montreal and examines marginalization, survival and psychological fracture. Critics and scholarly readers have noted how the novels interrogate belonging, language and the psychic costs of leaving home.

Rawi Hage writes from the seam where memory and metropolis meet. Born in Beirut in 1964, shaped by the Lebanese civil war, and after years in New York he settled in Montreal in the early 1990s. That transnational arc—Beirut’s violence, New York’s language, Montreal’s margins—supplies the raw material and tonal register of his fiction: terse, lyrical, often darkly comic, and always attuned to the costs of leaving.

A striking debut and a steady career Hage burst onto the English language literary scene with De Niro’s Game (2006), a compact, brutal novel about two young men in wartime Beirut facing the choice to stay and fight or to flee. The book’s urgency and spare intensity earned it wide acclaim and international recognition, including the 2008 International IMPAC/Dublin Literary Award. Subsequent novels—Cockroach (2008), Carnival (2012), Beirut Hellfire Society (2018) and Stray Dogs (2022)—expanded his terrain: from the alleyways of Beirut to the immigrant underbellies of Montreal, always exploring how uprooted people navigate moral compromise, loneliness and survival.

Language as survival A recurring theme in Hage’s interviews and fiction is language: English, for him, became “the language of survival and practicality” after time in New York, and ultimately his vehicle for fiction. That pragmatic relationship to language informs the directness of his prose: sentences that can feel cinematic one moment, hallucinatory the next, never indulgent but always precise. Writing in English allows Hage to translate the sensory shock of war and exile into forms that reach readers across contexts.

Exile, ethics and representation Hage’s work resists simple categorization as “war literature” or “refugee narrative.” Instead, his novels interrogate exile’s psychic consequences: the fractures in memory, the erosion of social bonds, the odd economies of dignity in migration. His characters are often anti heroes or survivors pushed to ethical edges, and Hage is careful about representation—rendering violence without glamorizing it, and probing how memory shapes and distorts itself over time.

Why read Rawi Hage? Read Hage for prose that compresses whole worlds into a few sharp pages; for stories that refuse sentimental closure; and for a transnational perspective that makes visible the human afterlives of conflict. Whether set in Beirut’s checkpoints or Montreal’s backstreets, his novels insist that exile is not only a geographic condition but a state of feeling: a perpetual negotiation between the past you carry and the city that receives you.

Where to start

• De Niro’s Game — a blistering introduction to Hage’s voice and themes.

• Cockroach — a dark, incisive portrait of immigrant marginality in Montreal.

• Beirut Hellfire Society — later work that circles back to Beirut with a sharpened, elegiac edge.

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