Photograph by thehayfestival
Nadifa Mohamed speaks with Ted Hodgkinson about her first novel, Black Mamba Boy.
Photograph by thehayfestival
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John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Nadifa Mohamed was born in Somalia and moved to Britain in 1986. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, published in 2010, was longlisted for the Orange Prize; shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the PEN/Open Book Award; and won the Betty Trask Award. Her most recent novel is The Orchard of Lost Souls. She is one of Granta’s 2013 Best of Young British Novelists.
More about the author →Ted Hodgkinson is the previous online editor at Granta. He was a judge for the 2012 Costa Book Awards’ poetry prize, announced earlier this year. He managed the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany, the affiliated Gregor Von Rezzori Literary Prize and still serves as an advisor. His stories have appeared in Notes from the Underground and The Mays and his criticism in the Times Literary Supplement. He has an MA in English from Oxford and an MFA from Columbia.
More about the author →‘It was in one of those listless summers after graduation that I found myself in the small Japanese town of Sasayama.’
A short film featuring Nadifa Mohamed, one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.
‘Silence takes the place of all these words and her loneliness remains as dense and close as a shadow.’
‘I became English by osmosis; a new sense of humour, altered manners, an alternative history filtering through my old skin.’
‘you dreamt of the CUNY / Graduate Center library / on fire, you dove in to save Stalin’s / copy of Capital’
Poetry by Kay Gabriel.
‘The terrain of literature is this space where you can pose these paradoxes of personal and political ethics’
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