Nuruddin Farah is a Somali writer. He is a winner of the Neustadt International Prize for literature and the Lettre Ulysses Award and has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His novels include two trilogies, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1980) and Blood in the Sun (1986). His most recent novel, Crossbones, was published in 2011. He has taught at a number of institutions of learning including the University of Minnesota, Brown University and Bard College in the US, and Jos University in Nigeria.