FARAH, NURUDDIN

born 1945, Baidoa, Italian Somaliland [now in Somalia] Somali writer, the first novelist and the first English-language author of his country. Farah was educated in Ethiopia and at the colonial-era Institutio Magistrale in Mogadishu, learning English as well as Italian. After working for the Ministry of Education, he studied literature and philosophy at Panjab University in Chandigarh, India. There he wrote his first published novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970). The book's story deals with the determination of one woman to maintain her dignity in a society that believes God created Woman from a crooked rib; and anyone who trieth to straighten it, breaketh it. In his next novel, A Naked Needle (1976), Farad used a flimsy tale of interracial and cross-cultural love to reveal a lurid picture of post-revolutionary Somali life in the mid-1970s. He next wrote a trilogySweet and Sour Milk (1979), Sardines (1981), and Close Sesame (1983)about life under a particularly African dictatorship, in which ideological slogans barely disguise an almost surreal society and human ties have been severed by dread and terror. Although his novels were sometimes criticized for their facile generalizations, Farah revealed a rich imagination and remarkable ease and exactness with the English language that made him the most significant Somali writer in any European language. The political nature of his fiction forced him into exile, and he taught in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in Africa.