Writing Sudan: Novelist Fatin Abbas reads from Ghost Season

Location: Joynes Reading Room, Carothers Hall (CRD 007) 2501 Whitis Ave., Austin, TX 78705

In the midst of the most recent war in Sudan, Sudanese-American author Fatin Abbas read to a UT audience from her highly acclaimed book retelling an earlier conflict moment in Sudan. The reading from Ghost Season: A Novel (W.W. Norton, 2023), hosted by the Joynes Reading Room, was part of a Rapoport Center-Plan II effort, as Joynes Room coordinator Zack Schlosberg remarked, “to bring students and faculty together from across disciplines to learn from literature as a site of both hard realism and imagining otherwise.”

Set in an American NGO compound near the border between Sudan and South Sudan, Ghost Season follows the lives of local and foreign workers at the compound, who are surprised one morning when an unknown charred human body appears at the edge of town. The novel features three principal protagonists, all from outside Sudan—a documentary filmmaker, cartographer, and translator. Abbas reflected on the importance of understanding the global actors who play significant roles in the multiple representations of a humanitarian and political crisis. Abbas’ reading was both informative and powerful, bringing to life emotional and physical landscapes of unforgettable beauty, terror, and grace. Athena Hawkins, Rapoport Center intern, remarked: “Through evocative reflections on the contexts of her novel, Abbas provided clarifying and moving insights into an ongoing and deadly conflict that is underreported and poorly understood in the US.”

Fatin Abbas is the author of Ghost Season: A Novel (W.W. Norton, US & Canada; Jacaranda, UK, 2023; also forthcoming from Rowohlt Berlin in Germany in 2024). Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Freeman’s, The Warwick Review, and Friction, and her journalism and review essays have appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde diplomatique, The Nation, Zeit Online, Africa is a Country, Bidoun, African Arguments and openDemocracy, among other places.

Supporters

Plan II/Joynes Reading Room, Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and Michener Center for Writers

Event series: Literature and Global Justice, Sissy Farenthold Fund for Peace and Social Justice, Book talk, Other Speakers