Granta

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with Nadifa Mohamed. Mohamed was born in Somalia and moved to Britain in 1986. Here she spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about how her first novel, Black Mamba Boy (which won the Betty Trask Award), was inspired by her father’s journey to the UK from Somalia, and how that process brought them closer together. They also spoke about her arrival from Somalia, growing up in Tooting and how she believed from a young age that cats were spies for the government. ‘Filsan’, in the issue, is an excerpt from her new novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US. You can also watch a specially commissioned short film in which Mohamed visits Shepherd’s Bush Market and explains why she wants to be the griot of London.