Mohamedou is an internationally-acclaimed author and is currently a writer-in-residence at both NITE and De Balie in the Netherlands. In 2001, he was detained and rendered from his home-country of Mauritania to Jordan. He chronicled his experience in his 2015 internationally-bestselling Guantánamo Diary, which he wrote from his isolation cell in the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
After fifteen years of detention, Mohamedou was released in 2016 to Mauritania. The following year he published a “restored edition” of Guantánamo Diary, filling in the U.S. government’s redactions, and in 2021 the book was adapted for film as “The Mauritanian.” In February 2021 Mohamedou’s first novel, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, was published by Ohio University Press.