Sudanese literature consists of both oral as well as written works of fiction and nonfiction that were created during the cultural history of today's Republic of the Sudan. This includes the territory of what was once Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the independent country's history since 1956 as well as its changing geographical scope in the 21st century.
Reem Bassiouney is an Egyptian author, professor of sociolinguistics and Chair Department of Applied Linguistics at The American University in Cairo. In Addition, Bassiouney is the editor of the Routledge Series of Language and Identity. She is also the editor and creator of the journal Arabic Sociolinguistics Edinburgh. She has written several novels and a number of short stories and won the 2009 Sawiris Foundation Literary Prize for Young Writers for her novel Dr. Hanaa. While a substantial amount of her fiction has yet to be translated into English, her novel The Pistachio Seller was published by Syracuse University Press in 2009, and won the 2009 King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies Translation of Arabic Literature Award. Bassiouney also won Naguib Mahfouz Award from Egypt's Supreme Council for Culture in the best Egyptian novel category for her best selling novel, The Mamluk Trilogy. She was also the winner of the National Prize for Excellence in Literature of the year 2022 from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. Bassiouney won Sheikh Zaid Literature Award for her novel Al Halwani: The Fatimid Trilogy in 2024.
Mansoura Ez-Eldin is an Egyptian novelist and journalist.
The Banipal Prize, officially the Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, is an annual prize awarded to a translator for the published English translation of a full-length literary work in the Arabic language. The prize was inaugurated in 2006 by the literary magazine Banipal, which promotes the diffusion of contemporary Arabic literature through English translations and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature. It is administered by the Society of Authors in the UK, and the prize money is sponsored by Omar Saif Ghobash and his family in memory of Ghobash's late father Saif Ghobash. As of 2009, the prize money amounted to £3000.
The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is a literary award begun in the UAE. It is presented yearly to "Arab writers, intellectuals, publishers as well as young talent whose writings and translations of humanities have scholarly and objectively enriched Arab cultural, literary and social life." The first award was in 2007. The total value of the prizes is DH 7,000,000 making it one of the richest literary awards in the world.
Hamdi Abu Golayyel was an Egyptian writer. The author of several novels and collections of short stories, he is known as one of the new voices in Egyptian fiction. Among other awards, he won the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2022. The literary magazine ArabLit called him a "chronicler of the lives of Egypt’s marginalized and working-class."
Edwar al-Kharrat was an Egyptian novelist, writer and critic.
Maha Hassan is a Syrian-Kurdish journalist and novelist. A native Kurdish speaker, she writes in Arabic. In 2000, she was banned from publishing in Syria for her "morally condemnable" writing, and since August 2004, she has been living in exile in Paris.
Hammour Ziada is a Sudanese writer and journalist, born in Omdurman. He has worked as a civil society and human rights researcher, and currently works as journalist in Cairo. Before, he had been writing for a number of left-wing newspapers in Sudan. Two of his novels were selected for Arabic literary awards and appeared in English translations.
Jan Dost,, is a Syrian Kurdish poet, writer and translator. He has written several novels both in his native Kurmanji Kurdish language and in Arabic. He is known as a prolific Kurdish writer, with several of his novels in the context of the Syrian civil war. Apart from his own works, Dost has translated Kurdish and Persian works into Arabic, including Mem and Zin, a classical Kurdish love story, written by Ahmad Khani in the 17th century and considered as the national epic of the Kurdish people.
Shahla Ujayli is a Syrian fiction writer and academic. A laureate of the Al Multaqa Prize for Arabic short stories, she became notable for her short story collection A Bed for the King’s Daughter and for her novels Summer with the Enemy and A Sky Close to Our House. Some of her works have been translated into English and German. Her work is part of contemporary Syrian literature in the context of imprisonment, war and exile.
Haji Jabir is an Eritrean novelist and journalist. He was born in the city of Massawa on the Red Sea coast. Writing in Arabic, he has published five novels until 2021. With the nomination of Black Foam (2018), Jabir became the first Eritrean novelist to be longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
Stella Gaitano is a literary writer, activist and former pharmacist from South Sudan. She is known for her stories, often dealing with the harsh living conditions of people from southern Sudan, who have endured discrimination and military dictatorship, war and displacement in the northern part of Sudan. Since the independence of South Sudan in 2011, she has also published short stories about life in her new nation.
Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin is a Sudanese fiction writer with roots in Darfur in western Sudan, whose literary work was banned in Sudan in 2011. Since 2012, he has lived in exile in Austria and later in France. He is mostly known for his novels The Messiah of Darfur and The Jungo, translated from the original Arabic into French, English, Spanish and German.
Samiha Khrais, alternative spelling Samihah Kharis is a Jordanian novelist, journalist and translator. She was born in Amman and completed her primary and secondary school education in Qatar and Sudan and her university education in Egypt. For around 20 years, Khrais held a number of positions in the field of journalism, including editor-in-chief for Jordanian Hatem magazine and writer for Al-Ittihad newspaper, among others. She served as board member of the Radio and Television Department and PEN International in Jordan, and one of the founders of Emirates Writers Union. She has published over 15 literary works, and was nominated for a number of literary prizes, most notably, the Katara Prize for Arabic Novel in 2017.
Bothayna El Essa is a novelist from Kuwait. A well-known author in modern Arabic literature, her novel The Book Censor's Library was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction in their category for translated literature.
Bushra al-Maqtari is a Yemeni writer and activist. She came to prominence as an anti-government protest leader in her hometown of Taiz during the 2011 Yemeni Revolution. As a writer, she is best known for her 2012 novel Behind the Sun and her 2018 nonfiction work What You Have Left Behind: Voices from the Land of the Forgotten War.
Ishraga Mustafa Hamid is an Austrian writer, translator, academic and human rights activist of Sudanese origin, living in Vienna, Austria, since 1993. A member of the Austrian PEN-Club, her works mainly deal with her own or other migrants' experience of displacement, racism or other forms of discrimination.
Adil Babikir is a Sudanese literary critic and translator into and out of English and Arabic. He has translated several novels, short stories and poems by renowned Sudanese writers and edited the anthology Modern Sudanese Poetry. He lives and works in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
ArabLit is an online magazine for information about translations of Arabic literature into English. The editors also publish ArabLit Quarterly as a print and electronic magazine, books with selected contemporary Arabic literary works and a daily newsletter about current publications of different genres of Arabic literature in English translation. Further, ArabLit's promotion of Arabic literature in English has been distinguished by British and Canadian literary awards.
