Celebrated novelist Nadifa Mohamed has been awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature Honoris Causa of the University of London by Royal Holloway, recognising her outstanding contribution to literature. She joined graduates from the Departments of English and Languages, Literatures and Cultures at a ceremony at the University on Monday 15 July 2024.
Born in 1981 in Hargeisa, Somaliland, Nadifa Mohamed moved to the United Kingdom at the age of four. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, won the Betty Trask Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN Open Book Award.
While Black Mamba Boy offered a semi-autobiographical account of her father's life in East Africa in the 1930s and 1940s, Mohamed’s second novel - Orchard of Lost Souls – was set on the eve of the civil war in Somalia during the 1980s. The book won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Albert Bernard.
She was selected for the Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Between 2018 and 2021, Nadifa was a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English at Royal Holloway. Her most recent novel, The Fortune Men, was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award and won Wales Book of the Year. She is currently presenting history documentaries for Channel Four in the UK and is working on her fourth novel.