By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NEW YORK (IDN) \u2014 \u201cFortune Men\u201d is the third novel by acclaimed novelist Nadifa Mohamed and the first by a British Somali to be shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her latest book tells the story of a notorious miscarriage of justice and the real-life wrongful conviction of British Somali sailor Mahmood Mattan for a 1952 murder in Cardiff, capital of Wales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Londoner Nadifa, who was born in Somaliland before moving to the UK as a child, spent years researching the novel including several visits to Cardiff and meeting with people who knew Mahmood as well as relatives of Lily Volpert, the woman he was wrongly convicted of killing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She first became aware of the case via a 2004 newspaper article when she discovered her late father, also a British Somali seaman, had known Mahmood in the 1950s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI found out about this case about 17 years ago and from that moment on, I became obsessed with it,\u201d she said in an online interview. \u201cI wanted to know who he was, how this happened, why it happened, all of the details. I also looked through all of the police archives, the court transcripts. What I found was a man who was a radical in many ways. He wanted to break down the rules that were forced on him. It\u2019s a novel in love with its main character and the world around him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mahmood Mattan, the central character of the book, was a fixture in Cardiff\u2019s Tiger Bay, 1952, which bustled with Somali and West Indian sailors, Maltese businessmen and Jewish families. He was a father, a conman, a petty criminal. He was a smooth talker with rakish charm and an eye for a good game. He was many things, but not a murderer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, when a shopkeeper is brutally killed and all eyes fall on him, Mahmood isn\u2019t too worried in the belief there were witnesses who allegedly saw him enter a shop that same night. However the court ruled against him and he was executed \u2013 the last to suffer the death penalty in that country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Walter Mosely, author of Devil in a Blue Dress, praised the book: \u201cNadifa Mohamed\u2019s The Fortune Men is a blues song cut straight from the heart. It tells about the unjust death of an innocent Black man caught up in a corrupt system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNadifa\u2019s masterful evocation of the full life of Mahmood Mattan, the last man executed in Cardiff for a crime he was exonerated for 40 years later, is brought alive with subtle artistry and heart-breaking humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn one man\u2019s life, Mohamed captures the multitudes of homelands, dialects, hopes, and prayers of Somalis, Jews, Maltese and West Indians drawn in by the ships that filled Wales\u2019 Tiger Bay in the 1950\u2019s, all hoping for a future that eludes Mattan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m working on an opera, and a few other things, it still hasn\u2019t left me,\u201d said Nadifa of the story of Mahmood and his Welsh wife Laura Williams. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFortune Men\u201d follows two previous widely acclaimed novels, \u201cBlack Mamba Boy\u201d and \u201cThe Orchard of Lost Souls.\u201d The latest book is scheduled for release in December. [IDN-InDepthNews \u2013 09 November 2021]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Photo: Nadifa Mohamed (Created on October 5, 2010) CC BY-SA 3.0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network NEW YORK (IDN) \u2014 \u201cFortune Men\u201d is the third novel by acclaimed novelist Nadifa Mohamed and the first by a British Somali to be shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. Her latest book tells the story of a notorious miscarriage of justice and the real-life wrongful conviction of British […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6062,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,26,16,32,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6061","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-africa","8":"category-culture-art-religion","9":"category-news","10":"category-regions","11":"category-sdgs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6063,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6061\/revisions\/6063"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}