Nadifa Mohamed on The God of Small Things
Nadifa Mohamed, author of The Fortune Men, recalls how she was transported to Kerala while reading Arundhati Roy’s 1997 winning novel, The God of Small Things
Nadifa Mohamed
With her third novel - The Fortune Men - Nadifa Mohamed becomes the first British Somali novelist to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The Fortune Men follows two previous widely acclaimed novels, Black Mamba Boy and The Orchard of Lost Souls. Mohamed has received both The Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, as well as numerous other prize nominations, for her fiction. She says she first became aware of Mahmood Mattan - the Somali man whose fictionalised story features in her book and who knew her father - in 2004, and kept checking back over the next 11 years as more information became available.
I knew I wanted to make the line between fact and fiction imperceptible
Nadifa Mohamed reads from 'The Fortune Men'
All nominated books
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. Nadifa Mohamed’s gripping novel about a petty criminal in Cardiff who becomes the last man to be hanged there, wrongfully convicted of murder in 1952.
