SPH Reads: The Fortune Men

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Somalia and raised in the United Kingdom, she holds a degree from Oxford University in History and Politics.

Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy (Harper Fiction UK & FSG US), was based on her father’s childhood experiences in East Africa and the Middle East. It won the Betty Trask Prize, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN Open Book Award and long listed for the Orange Prize.

Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls (S&S UK & FSG US), was set in Somalia during the Siyad Barre dictatorship, and won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Albert Bernard. It was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and long listed for a Dylan Thomas Award.

Nadifa Mohamed’s novels have been translated into twenty languages and in 2013 she was selected as one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, a once in a decade honour. Mohamed’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and many other publications. Her new novel, The Fortune Men was published by Viking UK (May 27^th 2021) and was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award 2021. The US edition of The Fortune Men was published in December of 2021.

Dr. Cozier is an investigator on the Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS) and the BWHS Sarcoidosis Study at the Slone Epidemiology Center. Her research interests include social and genetic determinants of health in African-American women — specifically, the influence of psychosocial stressors (e.g., racism, neighborhood socioeconomic status), and genetics in the development of cancer, cardiometabolic, and immune-mediated diseases (sarcoidosis, lupus). Additional research interests include oral health, and the role that religiosity/spirituality and the faith community, particularly the black church, plays in health promotion/disease prevention in the Black community.