Diriye Osman

Diriye Osman (born 1983 in Mogadishu, Somalia) is a British-Somali author, visual artist, essayist, and critic whose family fled the Somali civil war to Nairobi, Kenya, and later settled in London in 2001. His debut short story collection Fairytales for Lost Children (2013) won the Polari First Book Prize—the first African recipient—and was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian; other notable works include We Once Belonged to the Sea (2018) and The Butterfly Jungle (2022), praised for their surreal, queer Somali narratives.