Norwegian-Somalian poet Sumaya Jirde Ali was born in 1997 and has had an outstanding career, so far. When she published the first of her three poetry collections at age twenty, she was already an established contributor in the Norwegian public sphere. She received her first prize, The Bodø Citizen of the Year, in 2017, and The Zola Award for promoting civil courage and freedom of expression, as well as the Voice of the Year by the urban newspaper Natt & Dagthe year after. In 2021, she received the Amalie Skram Award for writing in the spirit of this Norwegian nineteenth-century feminist author. Ali has published two much-read and critically acclaimed memoirs, Don’t Be Afraid of People Like Me (2018) and Living in A Life-Jacket. Diary Notes on Norwegian Racism (2023), and in 2022, her first play, The Ocean Takes What It Doesn’t Give, was staged in Bergen. Apart from this, she has written a large number of newspaper articles and, among many things, edited the feminist journal Fett.
