Nuruddin Farah (, ) (born 24 November 1945) is a Somali novelist. His first novel, From a Crooked Rib, was published in 1970 and has been described as "one of the cornerstones of modern East African literature today". He has also written plays both for stage and radio, as well as short stories and essays. Since leaving Somalia in the 1970s he has lived and taught in numerous countries, including the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Sudan, India, Uganda, Nigeria and South Africa. Farah has garnered acclaim as one of the greatest contemporary writers in the world, his prose having earned him accolades including the Premio Cavour in Italy, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize in Germany, the Lettre Ulysses Award in Berlin, and in 1998, the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In the same year, the French edition of his novel Gifts won the St Malo Literature Festival's prize. In addition, Farah is a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Personal life Nuruddin Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, in Italian Somaliland. His father Hassan Farah was a merchant and his mother Aleeli (née Faduma) an oral poet. Farah was the fourth eldest boy in a large family. As a child, Farah frequented schools in Somalia and adjacent Ethiopia, attending classes in Kallafo in the Somali State. He studied English, Arabic and Amharic. In 1963, three years after Somalia's independence, he was forced to flee the Somali Galbeed following serious border conflicts. From 1966 to 1970, he pursued a degree in philosophy, literature and sociology at Panjab University in Chandigarh, India, where he met his first wife, Chitra Muliyil Farah, with whom he had a son (the marriage later ended in divorce). Farah subsequently went to England, attending London University (1974–75) and studying for a master's degree in theatre at Essex University (1975–76). His mother died in 1990, and in 1992 he married British-Nigerian academic Amina Mama and they have a son and a daughter. In 1990, he received a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service and moved to Berlin. In 1996, he visited Somalia for the first time in more than 20 years. Farah's sister Basra Farah Hassan, a diplomat, was killed in a bombing in January 2014 while working with the United Nations in Kabul, Afghanistan. Farah currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Cape Town, South Africa. Literary career After releasing an early