Nadifa Mohamed is the author of Black Mamba Boy and The Orchard of Lost Souls. She has received both the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, and in 2013, she was named as one of Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists. Her work appears regularly in The Guardian and the BBC. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she lives in London. Her newest novel, The Fortune Men published by Knopf, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Nadifa will be discussing The Fortune Men with special guest Tommy Orange in our City Lights LIVE! virtual event series on Tuesday, February 1st, 2022!
Where are you writing to us from?
London, with sunlight streaming through the windows.
What has been most important for you, personally/artistically/habitually, during the pandemic?
Getting out–whether to the garden, park, or the streets. There is something about walking among nature that makes our horizons expand and makes the moment feel like just one of many stretching back and forward in time.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
This novel was definitely influenced by Jamaican writer Claude McKay and his work on the lives of Black diaspora men around the world. He worked as a stoker on ships too, so I felt his spirit intensely while writing.
What books are you reading right now and would you recommend any to others?
I’m reading Abdulrazak Gurnah’s back catalogue and would definitely recommend it.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
I think Shakespeare and Company in Paris has a wonderful old building (and a lovely cat) so I would take that over. It would be called something unimaginative which I can’t choose right now, but the bestseller would be Home to Harlem by Claude McKay, which was written in Paris during the 1920s.
