Nadifa Mohamed
| Nadifa Mohamed نظيفة محمد |
|
|---|---|
| File:Nadifa Mohamed.jpg | |
| Born | Nadiifa Maxamed 1981 (age 42–43) Hargeisa, Somalia |
| Nationality | British, born Somali[1] |
| Ethnicity | Arab-Somali |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford |
| Occupation | novelist |
| Movement | Realism, historical fiction |
Nadifa Mohamed (Somali: Nadiifa Maxamed, Arabic: نظيفة محمد) (born 1981 in Hargeisa, Somalia) is a Somali-British novelist.
Personal life
Mohamed was born in 1981 in Hargeisa, Somalia.[2] Her father was a sailor in the merchant navy and her mother was a local landlady.[3] In 1986, she moved with her family to London for what was intended to be a temporary stay. However, the civil war broke out shortly afterwards in Somalia, so they remained in the UK.[4]
Mohamed later attended the University of Oxford, where she studied history and politics. In 2008, she visited Hargeisa for the first time in over a decade.[4]
Mohamed presently resides in London and is working on her third novel.[4]
Literary career
Mohamed's first novel, Black Mamba Boy (2009), is a semi-biographical account of her father's life in Yemen in the 1930s and '40s, during the colonial period.[5][6] She has said that "the novel grew out of a desire to learn more about my roots, to elucidate Somali history for a wider audience and to tell a story that I found fascinating."[3] A "fictionalized biography", it won critical and popular acclaim in countries as far away as Korea.[7] The book won the 2010 Betty Trask Award, and was shortlisted for numerous awards, including the 2010 Guardian First Book Award,[8] the 2010 Dylan Thomas Prize,[9] and the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.[10] It was also long-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction.[11]
In 2013, Mohamed released her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls.[12] Set in Somalia on the eve of the civil war, it was published by Simon & Schuster.[13] Reviewing it in The Independent, Arifa Akbar said: "If Mohamed's first novel was about fathers and sons ... this one is essentially about mothers and daughters."[14]
In December 2013, Mohamed was one of thirty-six writer and translator participants at the Doha International Book Fair's Literary Translation Summit in Qatar.[15] She was also selected to represent Somalia in the Hay Festival's 2014 Africa39 literary project.[16]
Awards
- 2010 Betty Trask Prize, Black Mamba Boy[17]
- 2013 Granta "Best of Young British Novelists"[18]
Works
- Black Mamba Boy (2009)
- The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013)
References
- ↑ https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/nadifa-mohamed
- ↑ Nadifa Mohamed, HarperCollins Author Profile
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "WDN Interview with Nadifa Mohamed: The Author of Black Mamba Boy", WardheerNews, 21 April 2011.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Arifa Akbar, "Black Mamba Boy, By Nadifa Mohamed" (review), The Independent, 15 January 2010.
- ↑ Hassan M. Abukar, "Black Mamba Boy: A Book Review", WardheerNews, 30 October 2010.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Benedicte Page, "Guardian first book award shortlist revealed", The Guardian, 29 October 2010.
- ↑ "Somali author Nadifa Mohamed up for first book prize", BBC, 28 October 2010.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ "Black Mamba Boy", Orange Prize for Fiction.
- ↑ Maya Jaggi, "The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed – review. The Betty Trask award winner takes on a complex history of Somalian civil unrest with a focus on women", The Guardian, 14 September 2013.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Arifa Akbar, "Book review: The Orchard of Lost Souls, By Nadifa Mohamed", The Independent, 16 August 2013.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
External links
- "WDN Interview with Nadifa Mohamed: The Author of Black Mamba Boy", WardheerNews, 21 April 2011.
- "Black Mamba Boy – Nadifa Mohamed" on YouTube.
- Nadifa Mohamed on Somali Writers, Asymptote.
- Nadifa Mohamed interviewed by Stacey Knecht for www.the-ledge.com
- Magnus Taylor, "An interview with Nadifa Mohamed: 'I don’t feel bound by Somalia…but the stories that have really motivated me are from there'", African Arguments, 1 November 2013.
- "Nadifa Mohamed: The Granta Podcast, Ep. 71", Granta, 22 May 2013.
- Granta Video: Nadifa Mohamed, 11 June 2013.
- EngvarB from August 2014
- Use dmy dates from August 2014
- Pages with broken file links
- Pages using infobox person with unknown parameters
- Infobox person using ethnicity
- Articles with hCards
- Articles containing Somali-language text
- Articles containing Arabic-language text
- 1981 births
- Living people
- Somalian women novelists
- British women novelists
- Alumni of the University of Oxford
- Somalian emigrants to the United Kingdom
- Somalian Muslims
- Writers from London
- 21st-century British novelists
- 21st-century women writers
- British people of Somali descent
- Somali people of Arab descent
- Somalian writers
- People from Hargeisa
- Black British writers
