Born in Hargeisa, a city in the north of what was then
Somalia, she was four years old when her family relocated to London, where they
remained when civil war broke out in their homeland shortly thereafter. It was
an experience she described as “a rupture of everything I’d known… going to
school for the first time in a completely different environment knowing that
the world I did know was lost in quite a big way was very traumatic.”
In 2013 she released her second novel, The Orchard of
Lost Souls. The book is set in 1987 Somalia, in the northern city of
Hargeisa on the eve of the civil war which would devastate and fragment the
country. The events leading up to the outbreak of civil war are experienced
from the perspective of three female protagonists – Kawsar, Deqo, and Filsan –
but the events and characters that populate the novel are based on dozens of
interviews, in addition to considerable archival research, that Mohamed
conducted as she developed the book. Having studied history at Oxford, this
part of the work came naturally to her. Read Full Article
