Narrative

Born in 1945 in Baidoa, Somalia, Nuruddin Farah is the author of ten novels, a nonfiction book, and numerous articles and stories in English; his work has been translated into more than 20 languages. The first novel in his dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk, won the English-Speaking Union Literary Prize in 1980, and in 1998, he was given the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Long before the collapse of Somalia’s government, he was pushed into exile by the dictator Siyad Barre, and has lived, taught, and written in many African countries. He currently resides in Capetown, South Africa. Because his first novel concerns the plight of a young Somali woman forced into an arranged marriage, and because his work traces relations between dictatorship at the national scale and patriarchal tyranny at the family scale, he has been celebrated as a “feminist“ African writer. Having dealt with dictatorship, breakdown, and exile in earlier works, Farah has begun in his current trilogy (Links, Knots, and a third novel in progress) to imagine possible modes of a return to Somalia.