Mohamed's first novel,
Black Mamba Boy (2010), described in
The Guardian as "a significant, affecting book of the dispossessed", is a semi-biographical account of her father's life in Yemen in the 1930s and '40s, during the colonial period. She has said that "the novel grew out of a desire to learn more about my roots, to elucidate Somali history for a wider audience and to tell a story that I found fascinating." The book won the 2010
Betty Trask Award, and was shortlisted for numerous awards, including the 2010
Guardian First Book Award, the 2010
Dylan Thomas Prize, and the 2010
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It was also long-listed for the 2010
Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2013, Mohamed released her second novel,
The Orchard of Lost Souls. Set in Somalia on the eve of the
civil war, the book was published by
Simon & Schuster. Reviewing it in
The Independent,
Arifa Akbar said: "If Mohamed's first novel was about fathers and sons ... this one is essentially about mothers and daughters." In 2014,
The Orchard of Lost Souls won the
Somerset Maugham Award and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. In December 2013, Mohamed was one of 36 writer and translator participants at the Doha International Book Fair's Literary Translation Summit in
Qatar. She was chosen as one of
Granta magazine's "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in April 2014 was selected for the
Hay Festival's
Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. Her writing has also been published in such outlets as
The Guardian and
Literary Hub, as well as in the anthology
New Daughters of Africa (edited by
Margaret Busby, 2019), which includes poetry by Mohamed. In June 2018, Mohamed was elected Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative. She joined the English Creative Writing faculty of
Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2018. Her 2021 novel,
The Fortune Men, is based on the true story of
Mahmood Mattan, whom her father knew. The book is about a petty criminal in Cardiff, Wales, who becomes the last man to be hanged there, wrongfully convicted of murder in 1952. In
The Guardian, Ashish Ghadiali wrote of Mohamed that the novel "confirms her as a literary star of her generation", while
Michael Donkor described the book as a "determined, nuanced and compassionate exposure of injustice".
The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the 2021
Booker Prize, and at the 2022
Wales Book of the Year Awards won the "triple crown": taking the
Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award, the
Wales Arts Review People's Choice Award and the overall prize for Wales Book of the Year. Mohamed has said that her next book will be "a contemporary novel set in the world of Somali women in London". == Television work ==