Nadifa Mohamed with Derek Owusu
Ask Penguin
Penguin Books UK
4.1 • 550 Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2022
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on the penguin podcast, Derek Owusu is joined by Booker and Costa shortlisted novelist, Nadifa Mohamed.
Nadifa joins us to discuss her latest novel, The Fortune Men, a fictional account of the life of Mahmood Hussein Mattan, who was wrongly convicted and executed in 1952.
They also discuss Nadifa's love for travelling, her interest in cars and which model she gifted herself, how fact informs her fiction and the importance of including flaws in characters.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Brought to you by Penguin. |
| 0:05.0 | Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where you talk to all kinds of writers about writing. |
| 0:20.0 | I'm Derek Ousu and today I'm going to be talking to Nadifa Mohammed. Nadifah is an award-winning novelist who was born in Somaliland, and today we'll be talking about the Fortune Men, a novel focused on Mahmoud Matan, a Somali sailor who was wrongfully convicted and hanged for a murder he did not commit. This is her third novel, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She's a brilliant and inspiring writer, and I'm so glad to be talking with her today. Welcome to the Penguin Podcast, indeed. It's great to have you here with us. Thank you. How are you doing today? I'm well. It's sunny. Summer's about to begin. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Feels good. Feeling good to be back in the UK after teaching abroad? Yeah. |
| 0:57.6 | Yes. |
| 0:55.1 | Um, I'm well. It's sunny. Summer's about to begin. That feels good. Feeling good to be back in the UK after teaching abroad? Yeah. Yes. Britain is a really difficult place right now. It just seems as if |
| 1:02.5 | politically, socially, everything is kind of falling apart. But it's home and it's better to be |
| 1:08.3 | in the fray rather than watching it from far away. |
| 1:11.8 | Be in a way, did it clear your head in a way? I mean, obviously, New York is not massively |
| 1:15.5 | different to London. It's like London times 10. Yeah, when I went, I always thought to myself, |
| 1:20.6 | this is just like central London, just massive, basically. Yeah, and louder and more aggressive, |
| 1:27.4 | more destitute, but also richer at the same time. |
| 1:31.8 | A lot of information they're taking for a writer. |
| 1:34.3 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 1:35.2 | I was hoping that I might get some writing done there. |
| 1:37.6 | But I didn't, but I did get a lot of reading done. |
| 1:40.2 | The first thing I wanted to ask you is like, you know, with the fortune men, you know, |
| 1:43.6 | we come across a lot of stories about miscarriages of justice and institutional racism. |
| 1:48.6 | So I wanted to ask what drew you to want to write a fictionalised version of Mahmoud's story? |
| 1:55.3 | So it wasn't a question of looking for miscarriage of justice. |
| 1:58.8 | It was the other way around where I was confronted with |
| 2:02.6 | Mahmoud's story a long time ago just after I finished university and was working for a film |
| 2:07.9 | company and I saw his face in a newspaper with a double page spread on what had happened to him. |
... |
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