Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin (Arabic:عبد العزيز بركة ساكن, born in Kassala, Sudan, in 1963) is a Sudanese fiction writer with roots in Darfur in western Sudan, whose literary work was banned in Sudan in 2011.

An imaginary tale based on selected historical facts, the story talks of the Omani sultanate, slavery and of the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar.

Further, it contains numerous details about the oppression of the island's African population as well as the sexual life of the Sultan and was subsequently banned in Oman and Kuwait.

In November 2023, this novel was awarded the Prix BaoBaB as the Best African Novel of the year at the Maison d’Afrique Mandingo in Montréal, Canada.

In 2023, Baraka Sakin was decorated Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French Ministry of Culture, in recognition of his contributions to literature.

(All original Arabic titles given in translation)

In Spanish translation

Baraka Sakin was awarded the BBC Short Story Prize for the Arab World for A Woman from Kampo Kadees in 1993, and in 2020, the Arab Literature Prize by the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris for the French translation of his novel The Jungo – Stakes of the Earth.

Commenting on this award, he said in an interview: "...this prize came at just the right time because my novel talks about religious tolerance, love and humanity, where we now live in a world torn apart by identity struggles, going through what looks like a clash of civilizations.”

Baraka Sakin has written for several Arabic-language magazines: Al Arabi magazine (Kuweit), Al Naqid (London), Nazwa magazine (Oman), Journal of Palestinian Studies (Paris, in French), Doha Magazine (UAE), Banipal (London), or Dastoor newspaper (London).

"Violence is carried on the back of the writer … who must write it all down. And in the midst of this storm of violence, there is the struggle for life, a flash of joy and pleasure."At the end of August 2022, the Austrian city of Graz announced that Baraka Sakin had been nominated for its literary award Stadtschreiber von Graz (Town writer of Graz) for 2022/23.

The jury explained the award with the following words: "In his novels, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin proves himself to be an astute observer of socioeconomic realities and, last but not least, a convincing analyst of myths and ideologies. The narrator counters the false authenticity of technocratic regimes and abstruse irrationalism with irony, satire and black humour.”

In 2022, his novel La Princesse de Zanzibar (The Princess of Zanzibar) was published in French.

It is popular with Sudanese readers, who had been smuggling his books into their country after their interdiction in 2009.

The Sudanese writer Ayman Bik called the novel The Messiah of Darfur "a great step forward, towards liberation from our historical ties with regards to the Darfur region, and regarding the systematic racism and the massacres committed in the region".

His short story A Woman from Kampo Kadees was included in the anthology Nouvelles du Soudan in 2010.

In 2011, Baraka Sakin received the Al-Tayeb Salih Prize for Creative Writing at the Khartoum book fair for his novel The Jungo – Stakes of the Earth, which deals with the conditions in a women's prison in El-Gadarif in eastern Sudan.

Shortly after its release, the Sudanese authorities confiscated and banned his books.

Since 2012, he has lived in exile in Austria and later in France.

He is mostly known for his novels The Messiah of Darfur and The Jungo, translated from the original Arabic into French, English, Spanish and German.

According to Sudanese literary critic Lemya Shammat, "Sakin has repeatedly reflected on the complexity of human experience during conflict, reflecting the horrible mass of contradictions that war brings.”

Baraka Sakin was born in the Sudanese town of Kassala near the border with Eritrea, but the roots of his family go back to Darfur in western Sudan.

He graduated in business administration from the University of Assiut in Egypt, and has exercised different professional activities during his life: as manual worker, secondary school teacher, consultant for UNICEF in Darfur, or as employee of an international NGO for children's rights.

His literary work, which speaks of marginalised people and war, with references to the Darfur genocide and the dictatorship in Sudan under Omar al-Bashir, is published in Arabic in Egypt.

In 2012, Baraka Sakin left Sudan, seeking exile in Austria, where he has lived since 2012.

Following the original edition, his novel The Jungo – Stakes of the Earth was published in English and French translations.

In September 2016, he was invited to Berlin as participant of the International Festival for Literature, and in 2019 to the festival of African literature Crossing Borders in Cologne, Germany.

His novel The Messiah of Darfur was published in a German translation in October 2021.

In a review for the German online portal Qantara, fellow writer Volker Kaminski wrote about the novel:

"The reader is caught up in the fate of a population trapped in a brutal civil war between government troops and rebels, with huge loss of life and little chance of survival. There are however strong, outstanding individuals who put up a brave, radical fight such as Abdarrahman, a war orphan who gave herself a boy's name."

The French translation of The Messiah of Darfur won the Prix Les Afriques in 2017.

In France, he also published a children's book as a multilingual edition in Arabic, English and French.

Several of his short stories were translated into German by Sudanese-Austrian writer Ishraga Mustafa.