Saturday 18 April 2026
Interviews
“Novels have taught me to value radical honesty”
20 April, 2024
Image
Photo from The Booker Prize
In a conversation with Geeska, Booker-shortlisted novelist Nadifa Mohamed discusses her lifelong relationship with books, the impact of Somali oral tradition, and the ability of literature to connect with broader audiences.
British–Somali novelist Nadifa Mohamed has long written about the forces that shape and unsettle lives: migration and exile, the pull of memory, the fragile balance between love and loss, and the quiet, often painful work of holding on to cultural traditions even as they slip away. In her Booker Prize–shortlisted The Fortune Men—a semi-fictional retelling of Somali seaman Mahmoud Mattan’s wrongful conviction and execution in 1950s Cardiff—she adds new dimensions: the corrosive weight of injustice, the banality of racism, the solitude of displacement, and the torment of a faith tested to its limits.
What distinguishes Mohamed’s work, whether fiction or essay, is the way she roots these universal concerns in Somali lives and voices, weaving them into narratives set against backdrops of historical rupture—the twilight of empire, the unravelling of Siad Barre’s Somalia, the brittle optimism of immigrant communities in Britain. Her characters, caught in the crosscurrents of history, echo experiences familiar to many diasporas, yet they speak with a distinctly Somali cadence: wry, stoic, and suffused with a kind of humour that coexists uneasily with despair. It is a worldview she once half-jokingly described in The Fortune Men as “the central philosophy of the Makhayad school of thought”—a begrudging acceptance that while fate may toy with us, the dignity lies in how we answer back.
And even in the bleakest moments, Mohamed allows her characters the last word. For Mattan, it comes in his final recitation of the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith, before the noose is tightened. For readers, it comes in Mohamed’s insistence that stories—however painful, however contested—still have the power to resist silence.
She spoke to Geeska about writing, literature, and the long process of making a home in Britain.
Faisal Ali: Did books and fiction always have a special place for you, or was it something that developed later in life?
Nadifa Mohamed: I think books became my companions from a very early age. Arriving in Britain, not knowing any English and being flung into the school system meant that books became guides to this new life. The Jennifer Yellow Hat books we had to read in primary school communicated so much more than the simple stories they told, they introduced a whole new culture and way of thinking.
FA: Which book would you credit as having inspired you to embark on a career as a writer?
NM: There is not one; I think I wrote my first novel Black Mamba Boy as fiction rather than as a straight biography of my father because of the influence of history and travel books on me. There is something ancient yet timeless about going somewhere new and writing about what you find. I wrote about my father’s journeys through east Africa and the Middle East as if he were Odysseus or Aeneas rather than as a victim of history.
FA: What was your favourite story as a child (in written or oral formats)?
NM: I loved story books, first with pictures and then without. Growing up in a loud Somali household books offered a way to turn down the noise, retreat into myself and travel without moving. I loved the dark humour of Roald Dahl but also The Worst Witch and Vlad the Drac. I liked naughty characters and identified with Vlad the Drac’s difficulty in learning the rules of a new country.
FA: Tell us about a time when a book totally changed your mind on something.
NM: I don't think it works that dramatically but the novels I've read have definitely formed or reinforced a particular way of looking at the world. Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Junot Diaz, Percival Everett; all the writers I love are interested in an outsider’s perspective on the world, while we, as Somalis, are often told to be wary of anything outside of our norm. Novels have taught me to value radical honesty, contrariness, and individuality.
FA: What is the relationship between your literary output and your identity?
NM: I have the kind of inner life that is very suited to writing literature so I'm glad to have found this way of life or it found me. I write fiction but have also written poetry, scripts and essays so I feel I'm always somehow still in motion, still in development. Coming from a background where there is not much of literary history is also exciting as there is alot to capture on the page for the first time, lots of stories that I hear from our oral history that are fertile ground for fiction.
FA: You are one of the authors that bring the Somali stories to life and make the issues and themes in our lives reach global audiences. What do you enjoy most about researching these lives and sketching them out for your readers?
NM: All of it; I studied history and politics at university so that research-heavy analytical look at someone’s life and how it connects to the wider political context around them seems a very obvious way to work my way into a character’s life and viewpoint. A character such as Mahmood Mattan made me write The Fortune Men as an expansive piece of writing, focusing on his life and the Somali experience of labour and migration but also post-war Britain and its judicial system and all of the countries he passed through. All of my novels have taught me a lot and have extended my education.
FA: What are you reading at the moment?
NM: James by Percival Everett, it’s great! A narrative of slavery unlike any other I've read.
