‘Mohamed’s solidarity with Mahmood’s community is made explicit’: Butetown, Cardiff, in the early 50s. 
Photograph: Hulton Deutsch

The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed review – a miscarriage of justice revisited

Analysis / The 2021 Booker shortlist tunes in to the worries of our age

Nadifa Mohamed is sole British writer to make Booker prize shortlist

Booker Prize 2021 shortlist unveiled as race for £50,000 prize hots up

Ashish Ghadiali

Tuesday 25 May 2021

F

ollowing the success of her 2010 debut, Black Mamba Boy (winner of the Betty Trask prize), and its follow-up, 2013’s The Orchard of Lost Souls (winner of a Somerset Maugham award and the Prix Albert Bernard), Nadifa Mohamed’s third book, The Fortune Men, a fictionalised retelling of the story of Mahmood Mattan, one of the last men to be executed in Wales and for a crime he didn’t commit, confirms her as a literary star of her generation.

Nadifa Mahomed

Interview

Nadifa Mohamed: ‘Modern-day Britain is intense’

The Somali-born writer talks about her Booker-shortlisted novel, the story of a victim of a miscarriage of justice in 1950s Cardiff, ‘broken hearts syndrome’ and her love of John Donne

Ashish Ghadiali

Saturday 9 October 2021

Recently shortlisted for the 2021 Booker prize, Nadifa Mohamed’s third novel, The Fortune Men, is a fictionalised retelling of the story of Somali seaman Mahmood Mattan, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in Cardiff in 1952. Born in Hargeisa in 1981, Mohamed is the first British-Somali author to feature in the Booker shortlist. Her two previous novels, Black Mamba Boy (2010) and The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013), won the Betty Trask and Somerset Maugham awards.