SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali-Italian writer, poet, playwright, and performer. Her work focuses on the Somali diaspora in Italy, intertwining Somali and Italian cultures and histories, and often drawing on autobiographical elements.
Born in 1973 in Verona to a Somali father and an Italian mother, she moved with her family to Mogadishu at the age of three, where she lived until the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991. After leaving Somalia, she spent several years in Pécs, Hungary, before returning to Italy and later settling in Brussels, where she currently resides.
Ali Farah holds a PhD in African Studies from the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. She has been involved in various artistic and interdisciplinary projects and collaborated with international organisations on oral history and peacebuilding initiatives in Somalia. In addition to fiction, her work spans theatre and opera, such as a 2018 reworking of Antigone staged in Palermo and the community opera Silent City, staged in Matera in 2019.
Selected honours and awards
2008 — Elio Vittorini Prize, for Madre piccola
2006 — Lingua Madre National Literary Competition, Turin International Book Fair
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ali Farah, Ubah Cristina. Il comandante del fiume. 66thand2nd, 2014.
—. La danza dell’orice. Juxta Press, 2020.
—. Le ceneri della fenice e altri racconti. Hopefulmonster, 2022.
—. Le stazioni della luna. 66thand2nd, 2021.
—. Little Mother. Translated by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi, Indiana University Press, 2011.
—. Madre piccola. Frassinelli, 2007.
—. The Commander of the River. Translated by Hope Campbell Gustafson, Indiana University Press, 2023.
—. Un sambouk traverse la mer. MEET (Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs), 2020.
