Nuruddin Farah

Nuruddin Farah (b. 1945 in Baidoa, southern Somalia) is an award-winning African author. He is internationally known, with an international literary reputation. His literary career stands slightly outside of the circle of the more canonical troika of African authors (Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), who came to represent, in its first phase, the face of African literature worldwide. From the beginning of his career, the hallmark of Farah’s work has been his interest in women’s experiences and rights. His ability perceptively to capture female subjectivity led some of his early readers to assume he was a woman. Because of his novels’ allusive criticism of the Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, Farah has been unable to return to Somalia since 1974, and he has lived outside of the country for most of his life. Continuing political upheavals since the Somali civil war have allowed Farah to return to Somalia only on short visits. As a result, exile is a dominant trope in much of his work. Farah is a polyglot who speaks four languages. However, except for one very early novella, he has only ever written in English. His works have been translated into over thirty-five languages but only in 2016 was a Somali translation of one of his works done, namely his first, most iconic novel, From a Crooked Rib. Except for two early freestanding novels, Farah’s novels are all composed as trilogies in which a range of ideas are explored from different points of view. His two most recent novels, Hiding in Plain Sight and North of Dawn form part of the fourth trilogy, provisionally titled Diasporic Stories.