Nuruddin Farah (, ) (born 24 November 1945) is a Somali novelist. His first novel, From a Crooked Rib, was published in 1970 and has been described as "one of the cornerstones of modern East African literature today". Farah has also written plays both for stage and radio, as well as short stories and essays. Since leaving Somalia in the 1970s, he has lived and taught in numerous countries, including the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Sudan, India, Uganda, Nigeria and South Africa.

Farah has garnered acclaim as one of the greatest contemporary writers in the world, 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.

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 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Cape Town, South Africa.

Literary career

thumb|left|Farah at the [[Festivaletteratura in Mantua, September 2008.]]

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. 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.

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)
  • 1998: Neustadt International Prize for Literature

Works

Novels

Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy

Blood in the Sun trilogy

Past Imperfect trilogy

Short fiction

  • Novella

Plays

  • ̶̶̶̶̶̶̶̶̶̶̶̶̶̶̶̶— (1976) "The Offering". Lotus (Afro-Asian Writings), vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 77–93.

Non-fiction

Essays

Autobiographical and literary essays

  • "Celebrating Differences: The 1998 Neustadt Lecture", Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah, edited by Derek Wright, Africa World Press, 2002, pp. 15–24.
  • "Childhood of My Schizophrenia", The Times Literary Supplement, 23–29 November 1990, p. 1264.
  • "A Country in Exile", World Literature Today, vol. 72, no. 4, 1998, pp. 713–5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/40154257.
  • "The Creative Writer and the Politician". The Classic, vol. 3, no. 1, 1984, pp. 27–30.
  • "Do Fences Have Sides?", The Commonwealth in Canada: Proceedings of the Second Triennial Conference of CACLALS, Part 2, edited by Uma Parameswaran, Writers' Workshop, 1983, pp. 174–82.
  • "Do You Speak German?!", Okike: An African Journal of New Writing, vol. 22, 1982, pp. 33–8.
  • "Germany—And All That Jazz", Okike: An African Journal of New Writing, vol. 18, 1981, pp. 8–12.
  • "Ibsen, In Other Words", Nordlit, vol. 34, 2015, pp. 15–22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7557/13.3350.
  • "In Praise of Exile", Literature in Exile, edited by John Glad, Duke University Press, 1990, pp. 64–77.
  • "Savaging the Soul of a Nation", The Writer in Politics, edited by William Glass and Lorin Cuoco. Southern Illinois University Press, 1996, pp. 110–5.
  • "Why I Write". Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah, edited by Derek Wright. Africa World Press, 2002

Social and political essays

  • "Bastards of Empire", Transition, vol. 65, 1995, pp. 26–35.
  • "Centuries-long War for Somali Peninsula", WardheerNews, 12 April 2018. <!--wardheernews.com/centuries-longwar-for-somali-peninsula/.-->
  • "Country Cousins", London Review of Books, 3 September 1998, pp.&nbsp;19–20.
  • "False Accounting", Granta, vol. 49, 1994, pp.&nbsp;171–81.
  • "My Life as a Diplomat", The New York Times. 26 May 2007. <!--www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/opinion/26farah.html.-->
  • "Of Tamarind and Cosmopolitanism", African Cities Reader, edited by Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pieterse. Chimurenga, 2010, pp.&nbsp;178–81.
  • "People of a Half-Way House", London Review of Books, 21 March 1996, pp.&nbsp;19–20.
  • "Praise the Marines? I Suppose So", The New York Times, 28 December 1992, pp.&nbsp;14–17.
  • "The Family House". Transition, vol. 99, 2008, pp.&nbsp;6–15.
  • "The Women of Kismayo", The Times Literary Supplement. 15 November 1996, p.&nbsp;18.
  • "Which way to the Sea, Please?" Horn of Africa, vol. 1, no. 4, 1978, pp.&nbsp;31–6. Republished by WardheerNews, 4 March 2015.

References

Further reading

  • Alden, Patricia, and Louis Tremain. Nuruddin Farah. Twayne's World Authors Series v. 876. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.
  • Jaggi, Maya, "Bitter crumbs and sour milk - a nation betrayed" (profile of Nuruddin Farah), The Guardian, 18 April 1993. Accessed 27 June 2012.
  • Moolla, Fatima Fiona, "Individualism in the Novels of Nuruddin Farah", PhD. thesis, Department of English, University of Cape Town, August 2009.
  • Moolla, F. Fiona, Reading Nuruddin Farah: The Individual, the Novel & the Idea of Home, James Currey, 2014.
  • Wright, Derek (ed.) Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah, Africa World Press, 2002, .
  • Wright, Derek. The Novels of Nuruddin Farah. Bayreuth African Studies, Vol. 32, 2nd edition, Bayreuth: 2004.

An issue of the journal Tydskrif vir Letterkunde (vol. 57, no. 1, 2020) contained 17 articles about Nuruddin Farah and his work.

  • "Nuruddin Farah", Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage, 2006.
  • Geetha Ganga, "Somalia in the fiction of Nuruddin Farah", Afrikan Sarvi.
  • "Nuruddin Farah: By the Book", The New York Times, 13 November 2014.
  • "Novelist Nuruddin Farah: Facing A Blank Page Is 'Bravest Thing' A Writer Does" (interview), NPR, 25 October 2014.
  • Brittany Vickers, "Somali Author Nuruddin Farah Speaks Truth to Power" (interview), Ebony, 14 January 2015.
  • Lebohang Mojapelo, "'The majority of writers in Africa, of us, confine ourselves, rather than having great ambition'—An interview with Nuruddin Farah", Johannesburg Review of Books, 10 April 2020.