Writer to Writer: Nadifa Mohamed and Douglas Stuart

Join two of the most exciting contemporary novelists to be recognized by the world’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize. Douglas Stuart won in 2020 for his heart-stopping Shuggie Bain. The following year, Nadifa Mohamed became the first British-Somali novelist to be shortlisted, with her “richly satisfying” (The Post and Courier) The Fortune Men. Both authors effortlessly put their readers in the shoes of characters struggling to live, love, and preserve dignity in the midst of entrenched inequity. Stuart’s boys and young men—in Shuggie Bain as well as the new, widely acclaimed Young Mungo—come of age amid poverty and addiction in Glasgow’s council estates; while Mohamed based The Fortune Men on the real-life case of a wrongly accused Somali man executed for murder by a racist justice system in 1950s Cardiff. Hear these lauded storytellers talk craft, the perils and rewards of drawing from lived experience, and the cathartic challenge of doing artistic justice to those whose lives often go unseen and unrecorded. The host for this session is Gaby Wood, Literary Director of the Booker Prize Foundation, joining us from the UK via the magic of technology.

The bookstore partner for this session is Green Apple Books! Buy the books online at Bookshop.org or purchase them in person at the Festival. More information here.

Book signing information: Green Apple Books in Freight & Salvage lobby immediately after event