Sofia Samatar

Personal life

Samatar was born in 1971 in a small town in northern Indiana, United States. Her father is the Somali scholar, historian and writer Said Sheikh Samatar. Her mother is a Swiss-German Mennonite from North Dakota. Sofia's parents met in 1970 in Mogadishu, Somalia, while her mother was teaching English.

Growing up, Samatar lived in various places around the world. She attended a Mennonite high school. For her post-secondary education, Samatar studied at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana. She graduated from the institution in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. In 1997, Samatar earned a Master's degree in African languages and literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. She subsequently completed a Ph.D. in 2013 at the institution in the same field, with a specialization in contemporary Arabic literature. She wrote her dissertation on the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih.

Samatar is married to American writer Keith Miller. They have two children, Isabel and Dominic.

Samatar speaks several languages, including Arabic and English. Additionally, she learned Swahili in college, and picked up some Zande while teaching in Sudan.

Career

Samatar began her career as a language instructor. Along with her husband, she taught English as a second language in Sudan for three years. They later moved to Egypt, where they served as English teachers for nine years.

In 2013, Samatar joined the California State University Channel Islands' faculty as an Assistant Professor of English. She taught writing and literature, and also established the institution's first Arabic class. In the fall of 2016, she joined the faculty of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Samatar started publishing fiction in 2012. In addition to her poetry and book reviews, her short stories have been featured in a number of literary publications, including Stone Telling, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, and Lightspeed. Her 2013 short story "Selkie Stories Are for Losers" was widely acclaimed. A fantasy piece, its protagonist's mother is a mythological selkie. Similarly, the monster in her 2012 short story, "The Nazir" (derived from the Arabic term for "to look"), is subconsciously based on the antagonist in the traditional Somali folktale Dhegdheer ("Long-Ear").

In 2013, Samatar published her first novel, the fantastical A Stranger in Olondria. The work was well received by literary critics, winning several international awards.

Additionally, Samatar has experimented with writing qasīdas in English. She and her brother have collaborated on a book of illustrated prose poems, entitled Monster Portraits. It will be published in 2017 by Rose Metal Press. A sequel to A Stranger in Olondria, entitled The Winged Histories, was published by Small Beer Press in 2016.

Samatar's main literary influences include Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, who were favorites of hers as an adolescent. While working in Sudan, she also read Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which she suggests was an important formative experience. Although Samatar was not immersed in much genre fiction, she admires the work of fantasy stalwarts J. R. R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as the Gothic fiction of Bram Stoker and the Brontë family, and medieval English legends such as Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales. She cites the contemporary work of Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, Miral al-Tahawy and Noura al Noman, and especially the postmodern narratives of Carole Maso as additional influences. In terms of poetry, the mystical and haunting verse of Rainer Maria Rilke is Samatar's principal source of inspiration. Due to her Somali heritage, Samatar's work also draws from the cultures of Northeast Africa. She thus culls poetic elements from Somali mythology, such as in her poems "Long-Ear" and "The Death of Araweilo", which are homages to the traditional Somali folktales Dhegdheer ("Long-Ear") and Arawelo, respectively.

Samatar serves as a nonfiction and poetry editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts.

Awards

Samatar has received various awards and recognition for her fiction and poetry. Her short story "Selkie Stories Are for Losers" was a finalist for both the 2014 Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Short Story, as well as the British Science Fiction Association Award and the World Fantasy Award.

Additionally, Samatar's poem "APACHE CHIEF" was a finalist for a Rhysling Award.

In 2014, Samatar won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel (the Robert Holdstock Award) for her book A Stranger in Olondria. She was also presented the World Fantasy Award for the work. In addition, Samatar received the 2014 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She likewise won the Crawford Award, and was a finalist for the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

Samatar's Monster Portraits, a collection of short fiction to be published in 2017, was a finalist for the Calvino Prize.

Fellowships