Blogs in December 2020

Elsewhere, Home 15th December 2020

Winner of the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award 2018 From one of our finest contemporary writers whose work has been praised by J.M. Coetzee, Ali Smith and Aminatta Forna, Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home offers us a...

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Slave: My True Story 16th September 2020

Mende Nazer lost her childhood at age twelve, when she was sold into slavery. It all began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, murdering the adults and rounding up thirty-one children, including...

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The Longing of the Dervish 4th May 2020

At the close of the nineteenth century in Sudan, freed slave Bakhit is let out of prison with the overthrow of the Mahdist state. On the brink of death, the memory of his beloved Theodora is all that has...

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A Line in the River 28th March 2019

A moving portrait, part history, part memoir, of Sudan – once the largest, most diverse country in Africa – and its self-destruction. In 1956, Sudan gained Independence from Britain. On the brink of a promising future, it instead descended...

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The Book of Khartoum (Reading The City) 23rd May 2017

Khartoum, according to one theory, takes its name from the Beja word hartooma, meaning ‘meeting place’. Geographically, culturally and historically, the Sudanese capital is certainly that: a meeting place of the Blue and White Niles, a confluence of Arabic...

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