Books set in Somalia

About the literature of Somalia

Somalia is often called a nation of poets, and its best-known novelist is Nuruddin Farah, whose books span the country's history from the 1960s onwards. For generations poetry was composed and memorised aloud, and Somali only gained an official written script, in Latin letters, in 1972. Many writers from Somalia have since worked abroad, and Farah himself writes in English. Clan, borders and the collapse of the state recur in his fiction.

Farah's From a Crooked Rib shows a young nomadic woman fleeing an arranged marriage in the 1960s, while Maps follows an orphaned boy in the Ogaden during the 1970s war with Ethiopia. Nadifa Mohamed's The Orchard of Lost Souls portrays three women in Hargeisa in 1988, as the Barre regime's brutality towards the Isaaq, a major clan, builds towards civil war.