I spent quite a lot of time in Cardiff and was helped by local people. How did you recreate the neighborhoods of Cardiff-the docks of Tiger Bay, where sailors carry parrots or monkeys in makeshift jackets to sell of keep as souvenirs Butetown, where Mahmood visits Berlin’s Milk Bar and settles at night in a boarding house Adamsdown, where his wife Laura, their three sons, her parents and younger siblings live in a house hit by shrapnel from a German bomb during the blitz Cardiff Prison, near Mahmood’s lodgings the Law Courts? JC: The sense of place is powerful in this novel. I was also lucky enough to meet an elderly sailor who had been at sea with Mahmood for eight months. I wanted to hear and read what a diverse group of people thought about Mahmood: from Laura who said “he was the best thing that ever happened to me” to the prison doctor who spends time interviewing Mahmood about his early life. I have managed to write a little but more importantly the next novel has been coming together in my mind. It has been extremely tumultuous, maybe the most tumultuous period in my life with big things-both good and not so good-happening. Nadifa Mohamed: I’ve been at home in London most of the time with just a few short escapes abroad. Jane Ciabattari: How has the tumultuous time of pandemic been for you? Where have you been living? Have you been writing? I think that I want to keep on taking risks in what I write about and how, and prize nominations give you the feeling that you must have done something right with your last work and to keep pushing yourself.” I think that every novel I try and write is a productive of so many conscious and subconscious concerns. How have these recognition influenced her work? “I’m not sure is the honest answer.

She also has won the Betty Trask award and the Somerset Maugham award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. The week of our email exchange between Nadifa Mohamed in London and my base in Sonoma County, it was announced that her novel also was shortlisted for the Costa award. The Fortune Men is a finalist for the Booker award.

The fortune men by nadifa mohamed