On Saturday 9 May, the Nairobi Forum hosted an evening with renowned Somali author Nuruddin Farah at the offices of the Rift Valley Institute. Nuruddin spoke about Somali cultural losses in the civil war.

Nuruddin is the winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Lettre Ulysses Award, and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. His body of work includes 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.