It’s a subject close to the author’s heart Mohamed has compared Mattan’s biography to her own father’s, both merchant sailors who were born in the same city and came to England at the same age. In her third novel, “The Fortune Men,” shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Somali-British writer Nadifa Mohamed returns to this real-life case to explore the centuries-long histories of the British Empire, of Somali presence in Britain, of the nation’s anti-Black violence, of the institution of prison in the West. A seaman from British Somaliland residing in Cardiff, Mattan was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Lily Volpert, a Jewish shopkeeper and moneylender, in the predominantly immigrant community of Tiger Bay. Mahmood Hussein Mattan was the last man to be executed by hanging in Cardiff, Wales, in 1952.
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