Nuruddin Farah

Nuruddin Farah نورالدين فارح
Farah in 2010 before a lecture at Simon Fraser University.
Born	Nuuradiin Faarax (1945-11-24) 24 November 1945 Baidoa, Somalia
Occupation	novelist, essayist, professor
Nationality	Somalia
Ethnicity	Somali
Alma mater	Panjab University among many
Subject	nationalism, colonialism, feminism
Notable works	From a Crooked Rib, Maps, Gifts, Secrets
Notable awards	Kurt Tucholsky Prize, Lettre Ulysses Award, Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Premio Cavour, St. Malo Literature Festival Prize
Spouse	Chitra Muliyil (1982-present)
Children	Koshin (born 1983) Abyan (born 1993) Kaahiye (born 1995)

Nuruddin Farah (Somali: Nuuradiin Faarax, Arabic: نورالدين فارح‎‎) (born 24 November 1945) is a prominent Somali novelist. He was awarded the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Personal life

Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, Somalia. His father was a merchant and his mother a poet. Farah was the fourth eldest boy in a large family. He hails from the Ogaden Darod clan.

As a child, Farah frequented schools in Somalia and adjacent Ethiopia, attending classes in Kallafo in the Ogaden. He studied English, Arabic and Amharic. In 1963, three years after Somalia's independence, Farah was forced to flee the Ogaden following serious border conflicts. From 1966 to 1970, he pursued a degree in philosophy, literature and sociology at Panjab University in Chandigarh, India.

Farah's sister, Basra Farah Hassan, was a diplomat. She was killed in a bombing in January 2014 while working with the United Nations in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Farah has two sons and a daughter. He currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Cape Town, South Africa.

Literary career

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 first novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970), told the story of a nomad girl who flees from an arranged marriage to a much older man. The novel earned him mild but international acclaim. On a tour of Europe following the publication of A Naked Needle (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 twenty-two years, teaching in the United States, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Sudan, India and Nigeria. 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 twenty years.

Farah describes his purpose for writing as an attempt "to keep my country alive by writing about it". 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. Though Variations was well received in a number of countries, Farah's reputation was cemented by his most famous novel, Maps (1986), the first part 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. He followed the novel with Gifts (1993) and Secrets (1998), both of which earned awards. His most recent trilogy comprises Links (2004), Knots (2007) and Crossbones (2011). His latest novel Hiding in Plain Sight was published in 2014.

Besides literature, Farah is an important scholar within Somali Studies. He serves on the International Advisory Board of Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies, published by Macalester College.

Awards

Farah has garnered acclaim as one of the greatest contemporary writers in the world. Having published many short stories, novels and essays, his prose has earned him, among other accolades, the Premio Cavour in Italy, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize in Sweden, the Lettre Ulysses Award in Berlin, and in 1998, the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In the same year, the French edition of his novel Gifts also won the St. Malo Literature Festival’s prize. In addition, Farah is a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is one of the only major literary prizes, for which he is eligible, that he has yet to win.

Selected bibliography

Fiction

• Novella
• (African Writers Series 80)
• (African Writers Series 184)
• US: Riverhead Books, 2014.

Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy

• Reprints: Heinemann (African Writers Series 226), 1980; Graywolf Press, 1992.
• Reprints: Heinemann (African Writers Series 252), 1982; Graywolf Press, 1992.
• Reprints: Graywolf Press, 1992.

Blood in the Sun trilogy

• Reprints: Arcade Publishing, 1999.
• Reprints: Arcade, 1999; Kwela Books, 2001.

Return to Somalia trilogy

• Reprints: Riverhead Books, 2004; Duckworth, 2005.
• Reprints: Granta Books, 2012.

Further reading

• Alden, Patricia, & Louis Tremain. "Nuruddin Farah." Twayne's world authors series v.876. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.
• Wright, Derek. "The Novels of Nuruddin Farah." Bayreuth African Studies Vol. 32, 2nd edition, Bayreuth: 200421:34
• Lettre Ulysses Award - Nuruddin Farah
• Maya Jaggi, "Bitter crumbs and sour milk - a nation betrayed" (profile of Nuruddin Farah), The Guardian, 18 April 1993. Accessed 27 June 2012.

External links

• Petri Liukkonen. "Nuruddin Farah". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Archived from the original on 4 July 2013.
• Nuruddin Farah archive
• "Somalia in the fiction of Nuruddin Farah"
• "Nuruddin Farah: By the Book", The New York Times, 13 November 2014.