Nadifa Mohamed

Nadifa Mohamed FRSL is a Somali-British novelist. She featured on Granta magazine's list "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in 2014 on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. She has also written short stories, essays, memoirs and articles in outlets including The Guardian.

Mohamed's first novel, Black Mamba Boy is a semi-biographical account of her father's life in Yemen in the 1930s and '40s, during the colonial period. A "fictionalized biography", it won critical and popular acclaim in countries as far away as Korea. The book won the 2010 Betty Trask Award, and was shortlisted for numerous awards, including the 2010 Guardian First Book Award, the 2010 Dylan Thomas Prize, and the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It was also long-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction.

In 2013, Mohamed released her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls. Set in Somalia on the eve of the civil war, it was published by Simon & Schuster. In 2014 The Orchard of Lost Souls won the Somerset Maugham Award and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

In December 2013, Mohamed was one of 36 writer and translator participants at the Doha International Book Fair's Literary Translation Summit in Qatar.

In June 2018 Mohamed was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.