March 10: How to Write About War: Literary Sudans
Mar 10, 2023
Writers from Sudan and South Sudan discuss the last few decades of war in the region and the many creative and political ways in which it has been represented in literature.
Watch the conversation here:
Panelists:
Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin is one of the most prominent novelists and short story writers in Sudan, with more than 15 works of fiction to his name. These include novels such as The Jungo: Stakes of the Earth, The Messiah of Darfur, The Bedouin Lover, The Khandarees, and Samahin. His short story collections include At the Peripheries of Sidewalks, A Woman from Kambo Kadees, and Bones Music. Sakin now lives in Austria and writes for a number of prominent Arab literary publications.
Fatin Abbas is the author of the novel Ghost Season (2023). Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Freeman’s, The Warwick Review, and Friction, and her journalism and review essays have appeared in Le Monde diplomatique, The Nation, Zeit Online, Africa is a Country, Bidoun, African Arguments and openDemocracy. Born in Khartoum, Sudan and raised in New York, she gained her BA in English from the University of Cambridge, her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, the City University of New York. She teaches fiction writing in the department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT.
David L. Lukudu is a South Sudanese writer, who has been writing for a while and has written mainly short fiction, a good number of them with civil war as a backdrop. His writings have been published in Warscapes magazine and BBC Focus on Africa, among others. Some have been featured in short story anthologies, such as There is a Country: New Fiction from the New Nation of South Sudan, edited by Nyuol Lueth (McSweeney, 2013) and Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (Africa World Press, 2016). He is currently working on a collection of short stories. Lukudu is also a public health physician with the World Health Organizagion based in South Sudan.
Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer and educator who co-founded and edited Warscapes magazine for ten years before it transitioned into the Radical Books Collective. She is the editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (Africa World Press, 2016) and her book Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (Routledge, 2019) looks at the ways in which the Cold War thwarted decolonization movements in colonized regions and used soft power to shape their literary cultures.petuates.