80 Years of Nuruddin Farah
Price: £10
Language: English
Join us for an evening celebrating Nuruddin Farah on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Widely regarded as one of the most influential African novelists of our time, Nuruddin Farah’s novels have shaped generations of readers and writers around the world. During the event, a line-up writers and scholars will pay homage to Nuruddin’s literary legacy, including: Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, a celebrated poet and novelist whose work moves between languages, cultures and histories; Aamna Mohdin, an award-winning writer and journalist for The Guardian; Alessandra di Maio, a scholar of migration, Africana and postcolonial studies who has translated Nurrudin’s work into Italian; Marco Medungo, a specialist in Anglophone and Italian postcolonial literature and author of Literature of the Somali Diaspora.
Nuruddin Farah: Born in 1945 in Baidoa, Somalia, Nuruddin Farah is an internationally acclaimed novelist and one of the most important voices in contemporary African literature. He is the author of fourteen novels, as well as plays, short stories, and essays that examine themes of conflict, exile, migration, gender, and the Somali diaspora. His debut novel, From a Crooked Rib, is considered a cornerstone of East African literature. Farah has lived and worked across the globe including in Sudan, India, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, the United States, Italy, and Germany bringing a deeply transnational perspective to his writing. Among his many accolades, he is a recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali-Italian poet, novelist, playwright and librettist. She holds a PhD from the University of Naples, L'Orientale. She is the author of three novels, Madre piccola (2007) Il comandante del fiume (2014) and La stazioni della luna (2021). Her first two novels were published in English translation as Little Mother (2011) and Commander of the River (2023) by Indiana University Press as part of the Global African Voices Series. She is also the author of the poetry collection La danza dell'orice (Juxta Press, 2020) and the collection of short stories Le ceneri della fenice (Hopefulmonster, 2022).
Aamna Mohdin is the Guardian’s first community affairs correspondent, reporting on the social, political and economic experiences of the UK’s diverse communities, with a particular focus on Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. She was previously a reporter at Quartz where she led the publication’s coverage of the European refugee crisis. She is the winner of the British Journalism Award 2022 and her work has been shortlisted for the British Press Awards. Her memoir Scattered: The Making and Unmaking of a Refugee, published in 2024, was longlisted for the 2025 Bread & Roses Award.
Dr Marco Medugno is a Newcastle University Associate Lecturer specialising in Anglophone and Italian postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, and World Literature. He is the author of the 2024 monograph Literature of the Somali Diaspora, published by Bloomsbury. His academic research articles have appeared in journals including From the European South, Italian Studies in Southern Africa, and Il Tolomeo. He also contributed to a special issue of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde celebrating Nuruddin Farah's 50-year literary career.
Alessandra Di Maio is a Professor of English at the University of Palermo, Italy, where she regularly teaches courses on African literature. A scholar of Migration, Africana, and Postcolonial Studies, she has extensively worked on Black Italy and theorized the Black Mediterranean, with a particular attention to how issues of ethnicity, gender, representation, narration, memory and forgetting interact in the formation of national and transnational identities, historical narratives, and imaginaries. She has translated into Italian several African writers from Africa and the Diaspora, including Nuruddin Farah (Rifugiati: Voci della diaspora somala, 2023) and worked on English translations by African Italian writers, including Ubah Cristina Ali Farah (Entirely, 2006; Little Mother, 2007).
Host: Zeinab Badawi is the President of SOAS University of London, having been appointed to the role in October 2021. She is a well-known Sudanese-British broadcaster, journalist, and author.