Nuruddin Farah

In 1992, Nuruddin Farah married Amina Mama, a Nigerian-British writer. The couple is blessed with two children: Abyan and Kaahiye.

Nuruddin Farah was born on November 24, 1945, in Baidoa, Somalia, to Hassan Farah, a translator for the colonial government, and his wife, Aleeli Faduma, a recognized Somalian writer.

At a young age, Nuruddin moved to the Ogaden region of Ethiopia where his father worked as an interpreter for the British. He received his early education from schools in Somalia and adjacent Ethiopia, and studied English, Arabic and Amharic.

In 1963, three years after Somalia's independence, his family was forced to flee from Ogaden as a result of serious border conflicts. The following year, he took up a job as a clerk-typist with Somalia's Ministry of Education.

In 1966, he got enrolled at the Panjab University in Chandigarh, India, and graduated with a degree in philosophy, literature and sociology in 1970.

After publishing a short story in his mother tongue, he began writing in English language. In 1970, he published his first novel ‘From a Crooked Rib’, a story of a nomad girl who flees from an arranged marriage to a much older man.

His next novel, A Naked Needle (1976), earned him the fury of the Somalian dictatorial regime. It was a tale of interracial and cross-cultural love and revealed a lurid picture of post-revolutionary Somali life in the mid-1970s.

During a tour to Europe, Nuruddin Farah came to know that the Somali government planned to imprison him over the contents of his last book. As a result, he began a self-imposed exile that lasted for twenty-two years.

He spent the next decades travelling around Africa and Europe but refused to move to the United States, where many universities were inviting him. He served as a guest lecturer in several universities in the United States, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and India.

In 1979, Nuruddin Farah started a trilogy called ‘Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship’ with the book titled ‘Sweet and Sour Milk’. It was followed by the second part of the trilogy titled ‘Sardines’ (1981), and the last one, ‘Close Sesame’ (1983).

In 1970, Nuruddin Farah wrote his first novel titled ‘From a Crooked Rib’, which is considered to be one of his most acclaimed works. It portrayed the determination of one woman to maintain her dignity in the society and established him as a ‘male feminist’.

His 1986 work titled ‘Maps’, the first part of his ‘Blood in the Sun’ trilogy, earned him much recognition as a novelist. The book is set during the Ogaden conflict of 1977 and makes use of second-person narration technique to enquire about the cultural identity in a post-independence world.