Sabah Sanhouri

Apart from her work as writer of essays, poetry and fiction, Sanhouri has been active as a mentor for young Sudanese writers, by conducting several workshops called #OneDayFiction in various cities of Sudan. The young participants' age ranged from 18 to 28 years, and included young people with disabilities and youth in prisons. Among others, these workshops were sponsored by the cultural section of the Embassy of Italy in Sudan as well as by the German in Khartoum Goethe-Institut in Khartoum.[1] In 2014, she was invited to the University of Iowa's International Writing Program.[2] She is a member of the Sudanese Writers Union and gave a TEDx Talk about her approach to writing in 2018.

In September 2016, she was invited to the German capital Berlin as participant of its International Festival of Literature and in 2019 to the Festival of African Literature Crossing Borders in Cologne, Germany.[3]

In 2009, her story Isolation won the Tayeb Salih Creative Writing Award for young writers and was published both in Arabic, as well as in a French and English translation. In his article on the topic of estrangement in modern Sudanese literature, translator Max Shmookler characterizes the story's "descriptions of the lone narrator and the desolate, dystopian town in which he finds himself" as "written in a tight, clipped prose, stripped of the poetic devices of meter, assonance, alliteration, and lexical coupling that give Arabic its particular aural appeal."[4]

A film adaptation of her prize-winning short story Isolation was produced in Jordan by the film director Burhan Saadah in 2013.[5] In 2015, Mirrors, her first collection of short stories, was published in Egypt, and in 2019, she published her first novel, entitled Paradise, in Khartoum.[6] In a review in Arabic, the cultural Internet magazine Geel gadeed characterized this novel like this: "Reading Sabah Sanhouri’s works; for me, is a risky journey, like entering an abandoned children's park in a city where a nuclear reactor has exploded. You might get cancer from radiation-contaminated minerals, and a hungry snake might pounce on your leg. And the journey of reading becomes even more dangerous, since the author belongs to your generation."[7]

• Isolation (2009). Short story in Arabic and English, published on online magazine Words without Borders[8] and in French anthology Nouvelles du Soudan[9]
• Mirrors. Collection of short stories (2015). Merit Publishing House, Cairo, Egypt
• Paradise. Novel (2019). Almosawarat Publishing, Khartoum[10]

• Al-Malik, A., Gaetano, S., Adam, H., Baraka, S. A., Karamallah, A., Mamoun, R., & Luffin, X. (2009). Nouvelles du Soudan. Paris: Magellan & Cie. (in French) ISBN 9782350741604

• Sudanese literature
• List of Sudanese writers

• Sabah Sanhouri personal webpage, with translations of her work in English, French, Italian and German
• Video by Burhan Saadah, based on Sanhouri's short story Isolation on YouTube