Nuruddin Farah

Nuruddin Farah (Somali: Nuuradiin Faarax, Arabic: نورالدين فارح‎) (born 24 November 1945) is a prominent Somali novelist. He was awarded the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Personal life

Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, Somalia. His father was a merchant and his mother a poet. Farah was the fourth eldest boy in a large family. He hails from the Ogaden Darod clan.

As a child, Farah frequented schools in Somalia and adjacent Ethiopia, attending classes in Kallafo in the Ogaden. He studied English, Arabic and Amharic. In 1963, three years after Somalia's independence, Farah was forced to flee the Ogaden following serious border conflicts. From 1966 to 1970, he pursued a degree in philosophy, literature and sociology at Panjab University in Chandigarh, India.

Farah's sister, Basra Farah Hassan, was a diplomat. She was killed in a bombing in January 2014 while working with the United Nations in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Farah has two sons and a daughter. He currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Cape Town, South Africa.