But as she began questioning her father, Mohamed was sidetracked by his dramatic story of traveling alone across Africa as a child in the 1930s. Mohamed, 40, who was born in Somalia and came to England in 1986, soon found she had a personal connection as well: Her father had known Mattan briefly when they lived near each other in the city of Hull. “What happened? Why was he here? Why was he executed? None of it made any sense to me.” “I had all these questions,” Mohamed remembers. Mattan’s conviction had been declared a miscarriage of justice and “quashed,” or rescinded, by a special appeals court just a few years earlier. In 2004, as a recent college graduate, she came across a newspaper article on the case of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor who had been hanged for the murder of a shopkeeper in Cardiff, Wales, in 1952. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.Įven before she became a writer, Nadifa Mohamed knew she wanted to tell the story at the heart of “ The Fortune Men,” her Booker Prize-shortlisted third novel (out this month from Knopf).
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