Nuruddin Farah / Sunday Author Series

Nuruddin Farah will be our featured guest on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 18 at 1:00 p.m. in LPL’s Callahan Hall. Nuruddin will be talking about his latest novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, and his writing career which has spanned four continents and an equal number of decades.

Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, Somalia and hails from the Ogaden Darod clan. Although he began writing in his native Somali language, he switched to English while attending university in India and all of his twelve published novels have been written in English (while also being published in translation in over twenty other languages). According to Salman Rushdie, Nuruddin is “one of the finest contemporary African novelists.” For the last several years Farah has been a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He currently splits his time between Cape Town, South Africa, and Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he is Distinguished Professor of Literature at Bard College.

Hiding in Plain Sight offers a provocative and intimate portrait of a family wracked by loss and learning how to live in the wake of tragedy. When internationally known fashion photographer Bella hears of the murder of her beloved brother by political extremists in Mogadiscio, she flies from Rome to be with his teenage son and daughter in Nairobi, where they are in boarding school. Also arriving are the children’s long-absent mother and her partner, who bring with them a chaos that mirrors the political unrest in the region and force Bella to decide how far her responsibility goes in the face of major upheavals.

Farah’s presentation at LPL kicks off this fall’s Sunday Author Series at the Library. The Series is being co-sponsored by the Friends of LPL and will run for four consecutive Sunday afternoons (all at 1 p.m.). The other authors in the series include: Oct. 25, Congressman Barney Frank, Frank: a life in politics from the Great Society to same-sex marriage; Nov. 1, Doug Hodgkin, Lewiston Politics in the Gilded Age: 1863-1900; and Nov. 8, Kate Braestrup, Anchor & Flares: a memoir of motherhood, hope & service.

Books will be available for sale at all of these talks and the authors will be signing books following their presentation. For more information, contact the LPL Adult & Teen Services desk at 513-3135 or LPLReference@Gmail.com