On inhabiting Mattan's character, Mohamed says it was a physically and emotionally taxing story to write. Mohamed writes about both sides with empathy. The book moves back and forth from Mattan’s life to Violet Volacki’s family, showing the impact of her death on the community. He became the last man to be hanged at Cardiff Prison. Despite a woeful lack of evidence against Mattan, inconsistent stories from witnesses, and clues pointing to other suspects, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. Mattan was a petty thief who was well-known to the police, and on the fateful night of store owner Volpert’s ( renamed Violet Volacki in the novel) murder, they came knocking at his door. They settled in the multicultural village of Tiger Bay, where Mattan found community with Somalis and other immigrants. Mattan eventually moved to Wales, where he met and married a Welsh woman named Laura Williams, with whom he had three children. The author’s father knew Mattan both were from Hargeisa, joined the merchant navy, and moved to Hull, England, in 1947. This is a story about Mattan’s last few months alive, though we are also taken back to his childhood in Africa. Mahmood Mattan was born in what was then British Somaliland in 1923 and landed in Cardiff after years traveling the world with the merchant navy. “I wanted to meet as many people connected to the case as possible, and that was a massive benefit to me because all these small stories, the texture of these people’s lives, only came alive once I met the living people around them,” says Mohamed. She met relatives of each of the families in the book, among them Mattan’s granddaughter, a Volpert family member, and the son of one of Mattan’s friends, Berlin. Mohamed conducted years of research into Mattan’s life through archives, newsreels, and transcripts from his court case as well as conversations with people who knew him. The book was published in the United States on December 14 by Knopf. Her novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year, and it’s not hard to see why: It’s a riveting tale in which Mohamed brings to life a 1950s port city and the injustice that occurred there. Mattan’s story became a 17-year preoccupation for Mohamed after reading a news story on the case.
In her third book, The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed re-creates the life of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali seaman wrongfully convicted of the 1952 murder of Lily Volpert in Cardiff, Wales.
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