Nuruddin Farah

Driven into exile by former Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, who sentenced him to death in absentia in 1976 for his second book, A Naked Needle, Nuruddin Farah is the author of more than a dozen novels about his homeland. “The country died inside me, and I carried it, for a long time, like a woman with a dead baby,” he told the Guardian in 2012. “It became the neurosis from which I write.” He has lived in Cape Town since 1999.