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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Igiaba Scego

Igiaba Scego is an Italian novelist and journalist. She was born in Rome in 1974 to Somali parents who had emigrated to Italy following Siad Barre’s 1969 coup d’état. Scego’s father had been a well-known politician in Somalia and had held posts such as ambassador and foreign minister.

Igiaba_Scego 2008 (lettera27 WIkiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0).jpg
Igiaba Scego at the 2008 Festivaletteratura (Photo: lettera27 via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Scego started her literary career in 2003 with a bilingual children’s book called La nomade che amava Alfred Hitchcock - Ari raacato jecleeyd Alfred Hitchcock [The Nomad who Loved Alfred Hitchcock], which is inspired by the story of her mother’s migration to Italy. In 2004, Scego published her first novel, Rhoda, which was awarded the Eks&Tra literary prize dedicated to migrant writers and their descendants. Rhoda is set in Rome, Naples and Mogadishu, and tells the stories of five different characters: Faduma and Barni, two Somali immigrants to Italy, the nieces of Barni, Rhoda and Aisha, and Pino, a Neapolitan volunteer social worker. In 2005, Scego edited the anthology Italiani per vocazione [Italians by Vocation] with stories by Jorge Canifa Alves, Sabbatino Annecchiarico, Kossi Komla-Ebri, Ingy Mumbiayi Kakese, Ubax Cristina Ali Farah, Younis Wakkas, Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo and Barbara Serdakowski among others.

Scego became well known after the publication of two short stories, ‘Salsicce’ [‘Sausages’] (2003 Eks&Tra prize) and ‘Dismatria’, published in Pecore nere [Black Sheep], an anthology edited by Flavia Capitani and Emanuele Coen (2005) that focuses on the experiences of ‘second-generation migrants’ in Italy. Since 2005, she has edited a series of radio programmes and authored columns in some of Italy’s prominent newspapers and magazines (Repubblica, l’Unità, Internazionale), as well as online magazines specialising in migration (Carta, Corriere immigrazione, Migra, Nigrizia, El-ghibli: Rivista di letteratura della migrazione). In 2007, along with Ingy Mubiayi, she edited a collection of interviews, Quando nasci è una roulette: Giovani figli di migranti si raccontano [When You’re Born It’s a Crapshoot: Young Children of Migrants Tell their Stories], a collection of stories by seven young Italians of African origin.

After graduating in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the First University of Rome (La Sapienza), Igiaba Scego completed her PhD in pedagogy in 2008 at the Third University of Rome, with a thesis on the writing of Erminia dell’Oro, Cristina Ali Farah and Gabriella Ghermandi. Scego’s Oltre Babilonia [Beyond Babylon] was published in 2008. Oltre Babilonia features five main characters – two pairs of mothers (Maryam and Miranda) and daughters (Zuhra Laamane and Mar Ribeiro Martino) and a shared father (Elias) –, who account for their interrelated stories alternating their voices in each chapter. The two mothers have escaped from dictatorship in Somalia and Argentina, respectively, and the two daughters have multiple cultural and linguistic identities. In 2010, Scego published a memoir, called La mia casa è dove sono [My Home is Where I Am], which was awarded the Mondello prize and adapted into a school text book in 2012. Igiaba Scego also appeared in the Italian film La pecora nera by Ascanio Celestini (2010). In 2013, she started a petition to destroy a monument in honour of the Italian war criminal Rodolfo Graziani, which was built near Rome, in Affile.

Her novel Adua (2015) features the main themes of Scego’s work: the double identity of Italians of African origin, the denunciation of Italy’s colonial past and its sexist and racist legacy in the present. Inspired by true events, La linea del colore (2020) intertwines the lives of two black female artists more than a century apart, both outsiders in Italy. 

While working as a journalist and a writer, in 2017 Scego also started a post-Doc at the Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research focuses on Italian colonialism and blackness in Italy.

Compiled by Simone Brioni (New York)