“Black Mamba Boy” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2010. Nadifa was named Best of Young British Novelists by Granta and she was included on the Africa39 list of the most promising writers under the age of 40 from Sub-Saharan Africa. While “The Orchard of Lost Souls” won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2014. It was also longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. “Black Mamba Boy” won a 2010 Betty Trask Prize, and was shortlisted for many awards including the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Nadifa’s writing has been published in outlets like Literary Hub and The Guardian, as well as in an anthology called New Daughters of Africa, which includes poetry written by Nadifa. She saw this as a sign that the child she was carrying would always be protected. She sat down for rest under an acacia tree and this black mamba snake crept upon her belly before it slithered away, leaving her unharmed. The title comes from when her grandma was heavily pregnant with Nadifa’s dad, she was following the family caravan and wound up getting lost and separated from the others. “Black Mamba Boy” is a semi-autobiographical account of Nadifa’s dad’s life in Yemen during the 30s and 40s, during the colonial period. In the year 2008, she visited Hargeisa for the very first time in over a decade. She’d later attend the University of Oxford, where she studied politics and history. But the civil war broke out shortly after in Somalia, so they stayed in the UK. In the year 1986, she moved with her family to London for what had been intended to be just a temporary stay. her dad was a sailor in the merchant navy while her mom was a local landlady. Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somaliland in the year 1981.

Black Mamba Boy by Mohamed Nadifa