SOAS University of London honors acclaimed Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah

A Somali Voice Honored in London

In a city that has become a second home to so many communities, a voice born along the Indian Ocean was celebrated this week in Bloomsbury. SOAS University of London has conferred an honorary doctorate on Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah, saluting a body of work that, for nearly half a century, has mapped the slippery terrain of exile, identity, and power. For a nation often described as “a country of poets,” the recognition lands like a steadying hand on the shoulder: an affirmation that words can carry a people when borders, governments, and headlines cannot.

From a Nation of Poets to the World’s Classroom

Farah’s reputation travels easily across languages and continents. Writing in English yet steeped in Somali oral tradition—the cadences of the gabay and the wry observations that fuel tea-stall debates—he has long written from and about displacement. His characters move between Mogadishu, Nairobi, Rome, and Minneapolis, chasing fragments of home that refuse to sit still. In doing so, Farah has become a cartographer of the Somali experience, drawing maps that are psychological as much as they are geopolitical.

His novels—classics like Maps and Secrets, later works such as Links and North of Dawn—have been taught in global classrooms for decades. Scholars often place him alongside the leading lights of African literature because he refuses the easy arc, preferring ambiguity and interiority, the messy reality of families torn and remade by war, migration, and the long shadow of authoritarian rule. The Neustadt International Prize for Literature recognized that scope years ago; SOAS now joins a chorus of institutions that see in Farah not just a novelist, but an archivist of lived history.

Why London, Why Now

SOAS—an academic crossroads for Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—has become a place where diaspora knowledge meets policy and art. To honor Farah here is to acknowledge that Somali stories have expanded far beyond national borders. London’s Somali communities have sewn their languages into markets and bus routes, classrooms and council chambers. Farah’s influence hums through those spaces; you can hear it in the poetry slams, the book clubs, the film festivals that keep surfacing Somali memory in new forms.

Abdirashid Duale, Group CEO of Dahabshiil—a financial services network that has long functioned as a lifeline for Somalis on the move—framed the award as more than a literary nod. “This is a proud moment for Somalis everywhere and for all who value culture and creativity. Nuruddin Farah has given our people a voice on the world stage. At Dahabshiil, we remain committed to supporting culture, education, and creativity worldwide,” he said.

The Diaspora Dividend: Culture, Capital, and Belonging

To understand why a novelist’s honorary doctorate resonates so widely, consider the scale and structure of the Somali diaspora. Remittances—frequently facilitated by networks like Dahabshiil—are estimated at roughly $2 billion annually, buttressing households, schools, clinics, and small businesses across the Horn of Africa. Those flows are not just economic; they are cultural. Money travels with stories: the phone calls, the WhatsApp voice notes, the shared links to a new poem or a debut novel. In a way, Farah was moving those currents long before digital platforms existed, sending back dispatches from the edges that helped a scattered nation see itself.

There’s also a clear trend line here. African literature is enjoying a broader, more sustained international readership than at any time in recent memory. Translation programs are expanding. Prizes have brought writers from the continent and its diasporas into sharper focus—Tanzania-born Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 being only the most visible example. Universities are refreshing syllabi to include voices once kept at the margins. Farah’s honor arrives within this larger shift, a reminder of the long labor that makes today’s onrush of new names possible.

What Farah’s Work Asks of Us

Pick up one of Farah’s books and you’ll find a conversation about power that doesn’t let you sit still. Families become arenas where history is fought over. Cities are characters with their own grudges. Truths are provisional, negotiated in kitchens, checkpoints, and embassies. For readers outside Somalia, his stories offer an antidote to the flattening gaze of the nightly news. For readers within the diaspora, they retrieve subplots erased by conflict: romance, humor, the texture of everyday dignity.

Farah’s recognition by SOAS poses gentle questions to the rest of us: Whose stories travel easily, and whose require an advocate? What does it mean when a people’s literature matures in exile? And how should institutions—universities, publishers, businesses—partner to ensure that cultural memory is something more durable than nostalgia?

The Books That Built a Bridge

If you’re new to Nuruddin Farah, here are works often cited by scholars and readers alike:

• Maps (1986) — A portrait of identity and belonging set against war and contested borders.
• Secrets (1998) — Family histories as battlegrounds, where intimacy and ideology collide.
• Links (2003) — A return journey to Mogadishu, with all the risks and reckonings that entails.
• North of Dawn (2018) — A diaspora family grapples with faith, loss, and the politics of home.

These aren’t entryways into a single narrative about Somalia; they are doorways into a mosaic, where exile is both wound and wisdom.

Beyond the Citation

Honorary degrees, of course, cannot tidy up the rough edges of the world Farah writes about. Somalia continues to wrestle with insecurity and the urgent demands of rebuilding. Yet the ceremony in London signals a kind of steadiness—evidence that cultural institutions are willing to anchor Somali narratives not in crisis alone but in the craftsmanship of a writer who has, book by book, widened the possibilities of what Somali literature can be.

And there’s a practical lesson here. When businesses in the diaspora underwrite scholarships, when universities champion complex voices, and when readers seek out stories that complicate the map, something durable takes shape. It’s the slow architecture of trust—the kind that outlasts headlines and fences.

Farah once suggested in interviews that he writes to keep his country alive on the page. This doctorate, coming from a university that has helped generations look outward and inward at once, feels like an echo of that promise. There is work ahead for publishers, educators, and readers. But on this occasion, at least, the applause belongs to a writer whose sentences have already done so much heavy lifting—bearing a people across oceans of misunderstanding and into the clearing light of their own testimony.

By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.