Fatin Abbas

Fatin Abbas 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 was born in Khartoum, where her father was a professor in the University of Khartoum's department of English literature. She grew up in a middle-class family there until the age of eight. 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.

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, 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: 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.

Works Mud Missive. Documentary film, 2009 "Womb Memories". Short story, published in The Warwick Review, Dec 2011 Ghost Season. Novel. W.W. Norton, US & Canada; Jacaranda, UK, 2023, ISBN 978-1-324-00174-4. Black Time: Scritti sull’Invisibile / Essays on the Invisible. Translated by Paolo Bassotti; Wetlands Books 2025

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.

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 Orange County Register

In June 2025, it was announced that a movie based on Ghost Season will be produced by Michael Bronner and Bhakti Shringarpure. South Sudanese documentary filmmaker Akuol de Mabior (No Simple Way Home) is going to write the scenario and direct the movie.