Fatin Abbas

Fatin Abbas (; born in Khartoum, Sudan) is a Sudanese-American academic and writer. Having spent most of her youth with her family in New York City and for academic studies in the United Kingdom and the US, she has become known for her essays and non-fiction writing about Sudan, as well as for her short stories and her 2023 debut novel ''Ghost season.'' After obtaining her PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, she has taught fiction writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Pratt Institute in the U.S., and Comparative Literature at Bard College in Berlin, Germany.

Early life and education

Abbas grew up in a middle-class family until the age of eight in Khartoum, where her father was a university professor in the department of English literature. Following the military coup by Omar al-Bashir in 1989, her father was imprisoned as a political opponent of the new regime and only released one year later. To escape further persecution, the family went into exile in the US in 1990. Working at the United Nations in New York City, her mother earned a salary for the family.

Abbas lived her teenage years in New York City and experienced racial prejudice against People of Color, as well as the cultural differences between life in Sudan and the US when she returned to Sudan for extended visits. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature from the University of Cambridge, a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Hunter College at the City University of New York.

Career as writer and academic

As a non-fiction author, Abbas has written essays, reviews and reports for international media such as ''The Nation,'' ''openDemocracy'', the Royal African Society's ''African Arguments'', ''Bidoun'' magazine, the German edition of '' Le Monde diplomatique'', the German '' Die Zeit online'', and ''Kulturaustausch'', a magazine published by the ifa - Institute for Foreign Relations in Germany. For the online magazine ''Africa is a Country'', she wrote a review of the feature film ''Timbuktu'' by Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako.

In her 2015 article ''Coming to terms with Sudan’s legacy of slavery,'' she discussed the history of slavery from the early 19th century up to independent Sudan. She outlined how slavery has shaped the prevailing public notions of identity either as Muslim and Arabized northern Sudanese or as southern Sudanese of mainly traditional African or Christian religious beliefs:

In an article published in German, she told the history of Khartoum from the anti-colonial Mahdist state in the latter half of the 19th century to the breaking away of South Sudan from the northern part of the country under the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir. Further, she has treated topics such as child soldiers and the world-wide proliferation of small arms.

Her short fiction has appeared in magazines such as ''Granta,'' '' Freeman’s,'' ''The MIT Technology Review,'' ''The Warwick Review,'' and ''Friction.'' Her 2023 debut novel ''Ghost Season'' is based on the author's personal experience of working for an NGO in the border region between northern and southern Sudan and set in the fictitious village Saaraya, a "flashpoint in the civil war between the Southern rebel movement and the Northern government based in Khartoum."

Abbas has taught Creative Writing in the department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Pratt Institute in the US, as well as Comparative Literature at Bard College Berlin, Germany, where she currently lives. Her 2012 PhD thesis at Harvard was titled ''Class, Gender and Indigeneity as Counter-discourses in the African Novel: Achebe, Ngugi, Emecheta, Sow Fall and Ali.'' In 2014, she published a literary review of a novel by Egyptian writer Idris Ali discussing Arab Nationalism and Nubian diasporic identity. Her research is centered on histories of the African diaspora, gender in African and Arabic literature, post-independence nation states, as well as colonialism and globalization in African and Middle Eastern literature and film.

Reception

In a book review of ''Ghost Season'' for ''The New York Times'', Eritrea-born British writer Sulaiman Addonia wrote that Abbas "mastered the courage to dive deep into Sudan’s wounds and taboos" and that "the stories of civilians in the grip of uncertainty make for a haunting account and a daring debut." Further reviews appeared in the Sudanese ''500 Words Magazine'', the ''New York Journal of Books'', the ''Orange County Register'' and the ''Star Tribune'' of Minneapolis, which praised her "great care and attention to place and character."

Further, ''Ghost Season'' was selected by Brittle paper literary magazine as one of the 100 Notable African Books of 2023.

Works

* ''Mud Missive''. Documentary film, 2009
* ''Womb Memories''. Short story, published in ''The Warwick Review'', Dec 2011
* ''The Circumcision''. Short story, published by openDemocracy, 2012
* '' Ghost Season''. Novel. W.W. Norton, US & Canada; Jacaranda, UK, 2023, ISBN 978-1-324-00174-4.

Awards and recognition

During her studies at the City University of New York, Abbas was awarded both the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize and the Miriam Weinberg Richter Award. She has been a Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholar in the United Kingdom, a Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and at Schloss Wiepersdorf cultural foundation in Germany, a Writer-in-Residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland, a Maison Baldwin St. Paul de Vence Writer-in-Residence in France, an Austrian Federal Chancellery/KulturKontakt Artist-in-Residence, as well as a Mophradat writing sabbatical awardee in Belgium.

See also

* Sudanese literature
* List of Sudanese writers
* Modern Arabic literature

References

External links

Official website

Interview with Fatin Abbas about belonging, writing and migrating, November 2023

''Mud Missive''
video documentary about potters on the White Nile by Fatin Abbas, on YouTube

{{DEFAULTSORT:Abbas, Fatin
Living people
1982 births
21st-century Sudanese writers
Alumni of the University of Cambridge
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Hunter College alumni
Sudanese emigrants to the United States
Sudanese novelists
Sudanese women novelists
Sudanese women writers
Writers from Khartoum