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“Creatively, I had to face everything and everyone I had lost before I could think about the present…By writing in print those stories that I know will never be carved into official memorials, I have made my leap at posterity.”

A Somali-British novelist excavating the relics of shared history.

Biography

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somaliland, in 1981. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, won the Betty Trask Prize; it was longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN Open Book Award. In 2013, she was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has recently been awarded an Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Mohamed’s second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Albert Bernard. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her latest novel, The Fortune Men, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021, and is also on the shortlist for the 2021 Costa Novel Award.

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