Nuruddin Farah
Somali novelist (born 1945)
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Farah has garnered acclaim as one of the greatest contemporary writers in the world, his prose having earned him accolades including the Premio Cavour in Italy, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize in Germany, the Lettre Ulysses Award in Berlin, and in 1998, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In the same year, the French edition of his 1993 novel Gifts won the St Malo Literature Festival's prize. In addition, Farah is a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Personal life
Nuruddin Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, in Italian Somaliland. His father Hassan Farah was a merchant and interpreter and his mother Aleeli (née Faduma) an oral poet. Farah was the fourth eldest boy in a large family.
As a child, Farah frequented schools in Somalia and adjacent Ethiopia, attending classes in Kallafo in Ogaden (now the Somali Region). He studied English, Arabic and Amharic. In 1963, he was forced to flee the region following the Ogaden Rebellion and subsequent border conflicts between Somalia and Ethiopia. He settled in independent Somalia, where he found work as a typist in the Ministry of Education.
From 1966 to 1970, he pursued a degree in philosophy, literature and sociology at Panjab University in Chandigarh, India, where he met his first wife, Chitra Muliyil Farah, with whom he had a son (the marriage later ended in divorce). Farah subsequently went to England, attending London University (1974–75) and studying for a master's degree in theatre at Essex University (1975–76). His mother died in 1990, and in 1992 he married British-Nigerian academic Amina Mama and they have a son and a daughter.
In 1990, he received a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service and moved to Berlin. In 1996, he visited Somalia for the first time in more than 20 years.
Farah's sister Basra Farah Hassan, a diplomat, was killed in a bombing in January 2014 while working with the United Nations in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Farah currently resides between Minneapolis, Minnesota, Cape Town, South Africa, and New York City, where he has been Distinguished Professor of Literature at Bard College since 2010.
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Literary career
After releasing an early short story in his native Somali language, Farah shifted to writing in English while still attending university in India. His books have been translated into 17 languages.
His debut novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970), told the story of a nomad girl who flees from an arranged marriage to a much older man. Published by Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) in their African Writers Series, the novel earned him mild but international acclaim. On a tour of Europe following the publication of A Naked Needle (HEB, 1976), Farah was warned that the Somali government planned to arrest him over its contents. Rather than return and face imprisonment, Farah began a self-imposed exile that would last for 22 years, during which time he taught in the United States, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Sudan, India and Nigeria.
Farah describes his purpose for writing as an attempt "to keep my country alive by writing about it", and for Nadine Gordimer he was one of the continent's "true interpreters". His trilogies of novels – "Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship" (1980–83) and "Blood in the Sun" (1986–99) – form the core of his work. First published by Allison and Busby, "Variations" included Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Sardines (1981) and Close Sesame (1983), and was well received in a number of countries. Farah's reputation was cemented by his most famous novel, Maps (1986), the first volume of his "Blood in the Sun" trilogy. Maps, which is set during the Ogaden conflict of 1977, employs the innovative technique of second-person narration for exploring questions of cultural identity in a post-independence world. Farah followed this with Gifts (1993) and Secrets (1998), both of which earned awards. His subsequent "Past Imperfect" trilogy comprises Links (2004), Knots (2007) and Crossbones (2011). His most recent novels are Hiding in Plain Sight, published in 2014, and North of Dawn (2018). Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bhakti Shringarpure observed: "The most prolific writer Somalia has ever produced, Farah has indeed kept his country alive in our collective imaginations for the past 40 years. ... North of Dawn beautifully articulates the pervasive anxiety and nervous condition of being a migrant."
Farah is also a playwright, whose plays include work for the stage — A Dagger in Vacuum (produced Mogadiscio, 1970), The Offering (produced Colchester, Essex, 1975), Yussuf and His Brothers (produced Jos, Nigeria, 1982) — and for radio: Tartar Delight, 1980 (Germany), and A Spread of Butter.
Besides literature, Farah is an important scholar within Somali Studies. Additionally Farah has held a number of professorships across a variety of institutions around the world including University of Khartoum, University of Minnesota, Stony Brook UniversityBrown University, and since 2010 at Bard College, where he is Distinguished Professor of Literature, teaching intermittently between writing across the Literature, Written Arts, and Africana Studies departments at Bard College, where some of his colleagues have included other African luminaries in contemporary African and Diaspora literature including the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, Ethiopian-American novelist, PEN American Center President, and Written Arts Program Department Head Dinaw Mengestu, and Nigerian-American Novelist, Photographer and Art Historian Teju Cole. Farah also serves on the International Advisory Board of Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies, published by Macalester College.
Selected awards and honours
- 1974–76: UNESCO fellowship
- 1980: English-Speaking Union Literary Award (for Sweet and Sour Milk)
- 1990: Corman Artists fellowship
- 1991: Kurt Tucholsky Prize, Stockholm, Sweden
- 1993: Best Novel Award, Zimbabwe (for Gifts)
- 1994: Premio Cavour, Italy (for Italian translation of Close Sesame)
- 1998: Neustadt International Prize for Literature
- 1998: St Malo Literary Festival award (for French edition of Gifts)
- 2024: Royal Society of Literature International Writer