Author talk: 'Ghost Season' by Fatin Abbas
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
6:30 pm to 8:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- Kamran Djam Lecture Theatre (DLT)
- Event type
- Seminar & Event highlights
About this event
Join SOAS Library for an evening celebrating the paperback release of Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas!
SOAS Library welcomes Fatin Abbas in conversation with Dr Ida Hadjivayanis, chair of the SOAS Centre of African Studies, to celebrate Ghost Season, a powerful debut connecting five characters caught in the crosshairs of conflict on the Sudanese border.
Join us for a discussion that examines how Abbas weaves the story of Sudan's partition into the fabric of her characters identities while exploring the porous and perilous nature of borders.
Books will be sold by Jacaranda Books with a book signing to follow the conversation and a chance to meet Fatin in person.
Testimonials
'With supreme skill and reverence, capturing shards, stillness and chaos, Fatin Abbas delivers a novel that gallops close and parallel to current events in Sudan' – Leila Aboulela, author of River Spirit
About the speaker
Fatin Abbas
Fatin Abbas is the author of Ghost Season: A Novel (2023) and Black Time / Essays on the Invisible (2025). Ghost Season was longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and named among the best African books of 2023 by African Arguments, Brittle Paper, and The Continent. Her short fiction appears in Granta, Freeman’s, The Warwick Review, and Friction, and her journalism in leading international outlets. She has held fellowships and residencies across Europe. Born in Khartoum and raised in New York, she received her BA from Cambridge, PhD from Harvard, and MFA from Hunter College. She teaches fiction writing in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing program.
Chair
Ida Hadjivayanis is a Senior Lecturer in Swahili at SOAS University of London. Her teaching and research focus on Swahili language acquisition, translation studies, and Area Studies, with a particular emphasis on the Swahili coast. She has translated Dhulma (2025) and Peponi (2022), the Swahili versions of Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels Theft (2025) and Paradise (1994), respectively.
