Mohamed Al-Hassan Hummaid

Mohamed Al-Hassan Hummaid was a very popular Sudanese poet who wrote in dialect. He was killed in a car crash in Khartoum in March 2012.

Fouad Mohammad Fouad

Fouad Mohammad Fouad is a Syrian doctor, public health researcher, and poet. He was born in Aleppo in 1961. In 1980, Fouad was one of a group of younger Syrian writers to participate in the formation of the Aleppo University Conference, a group that made a novel contribution to modern poetry in Syria and the […]

Samuel Wilder

Samuel Wilder is a translator of Arabic literature, a writer, and a student of comparative poetics. Since 2006, he has lived and worked as a literary translator in Cairo and Beirut, and pursued academic work in London and Cambridge. While a student at Brown University in 2005, he was awarded the Lucius Lyon Prize for […]

Ateif Khieri

Ateif Khieri is one of the most highly regarded Sudanese poets of his generation. Born in Karima in northern Sudan in 1967, he moved to Khartoum in 1986 to study Drama at Sudan University. He became actively involved in the city’s then thriving theatres, quickly gaining acclaim for his work as an actor and director. […]

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi is one of the leading African poets writing in Arabic today. He has gained a wide audience in his native Sudan for his imaginative approach to poetry and for the delicacy and emotional frankness of his lyrics. His poetry has always been concerned with the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of Sudan and […]

Abdullah al Ryami

Abdullah al Ryami was born in 1965 in Cairo, where his father had taken refuge from the British-backed suppression of the Omani uprising. As a result of this displacement, Al Ryami’s life has been that of an outsider. His first collection of poems was published in 1992. He helped to found the avant-garde theatre group […]

Nariman Youssef

Nariman Youssef is a Cairo-born, London-based semi-freelance translator with an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Edinburgh. She works between Arabic and English and part-time manages a translation team at the British Library. Literary translations include Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter, Donia Kamal’s Cigarette No. 7, contributions in Words Without Borders, The Common, […]

Mostafa Ibrahim

Born in 1986, Mostafa Ibrahim is considered one of Egypt’s most exciting young poets and has been lauded by the country’s two leading colloquial poets, Abdel-Rahman Al-Abnudi and the late Ahmed Fuad Negm. His first collection of poems, Western Union, Haram, came out in January 2011 (just before the ‘Arab Spring’). His second collection of […]

Rashid El Sheikh

Rashid El Sheikh migrated from Sudan to the UK in 1991 as a political refugee. He obtained a diploma in International Studies from Birkbeck College and an MA in Cultural Policy Management from City University. He is Senior Coordinator of the International Relations Department at the Wellington Hospital in London.