2016 was a remarkable year for the Somali writer Abdul Adan. His short story, “The Lifebloom Gift,” was shortlisted for the Caine Prize and his proposal for a novel won him a Miles Morland Scholarship. We also published an interview with him.
Last week, Kenya’s Nation Media Group ran a profile on him titled “Abdul Adan’s Long Walk from El Wak to Hallowed Literary Halls.”
It is a tender story of how, as a primary school child, he wrote a book entitled A Trip to the Countryside.
His father paid a local with a big printer to publish the book, A Trip to the Countryside, about five years later when he was in high school. His cousin, Ibrahim Adan, who had a degree in literature edited it and his father sold this book from the counter of his general hardware shop.
Years later, he moved to the US and worked as a taxi-driver in Chicago. His first short story, “Old Ibren,” was published in African Writing in 2010. And then “A Bag of Oranges” in Kwani? later that year. And then in 2014, his “The Somalification of James” earned an honorable mention by the Caine Prize. And then, late last year, his Miles Morland win.
For fans who are curious about his debut novel, here is what we know.
The novel will revolve around the narrator who has been deported from the US and leaves in the border town of El WaK. He suffers from an obsession of analysing people. They include a girl from Seattle whom he thinks is too airy and forgettable, a dead poet from Kazakhstan whose suicide note the narrator comes across in a journal, and a radical-extremist who applies lubricants on his hostages before executing them.
Read the full piece HERE.
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