PEN Pinter Prize 2025 winner Leila Aboulela reflects on Sudan, exile, and storytelling

Born in Cairo, Leila Aboulela grew up in Khartoum and left Sudan for Scotland in 1990, where she began writing. 

A novelist, playwright, and short story writer, Leila was the inaugural recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000 for her short story The Museum.

Her novels, such as The Translator (1999), Minaret (2005), and Bird Summons (2019), thread on Sudanese diasporic experiences in the United Kingdom from the vantage point of Muslim women.

Her latest historical novel, River Spirit (2023), is set in Sudan and revisits the period of the Mahdist War. Despite and in many ways in defiance of the ongoing war, an Arabic translation of River Spirit was released in 2024 by the Karthoum-based publishing house Dar Al Musawarat, translated by Professor Badreldin Al Hashimi.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 2023, Leila’s works have received numerous literary distinctions, including the Scottish Book Awards for Fiction and the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award.

In July, she was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, a literary award from PEN English. The New Arab speaks with Leila Aboulela to find out more about her work and achievements. 

The New Arab: First of all, congratulations on being awarded the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize, a prize created to recognise writers' 'fierce intellectual determination ... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’. What role does truth play in your writing practice and your works of fiction more broadly?

Leila Aboulela: Humans are incredible when it comes to self-deceit and denial, as well as blocking out what is unpalatable. I’ve always been attracted to the idea of fiction as a place in which we can talk about matters that are not usually discussed in society.

As an immigrant in Britain, I had mixed feelings about this move – humiliation, a sense of opportunity, gratitude, fears of missing out, anxiety about my children’s futures – and although other immigrants shared these complexities, they did not want to discuss them.

It was also regarded as self-indulgent to talk about homesickness. Fiction can provide a space for such truths and lay them bare. Fiction can go beyond the official lines, the media tropes and beyond the correct answer to a question. Truth is usually what makes us uncomfortable. Truth is obvious, yet it moves in a hidden current. 

This coming October, you will also select the 2025 PEN Pinter Writer of Courage. What distinguishes a ‘writer of courage’ these days?

The courageous writers of today are the Palestinian journalists risking their lives — and dying — to report on the genocide in Gaza. They are reporting in the most difficult circumstances, while upholding high professional standards in extreme conditions.

Their work is so valuable not only because they are exposing, with urgency, what is happening now but also because they are bearing witness and providing primary sources for the historical record. 

Some Sudanese writers remained in Sudan during the war, choosing not to flee to protect their personal libraries. This is so moving and courageous. The memoirs of these writers will be a vital testimony to what life was like in Sudan during the war. 

You’ve mentioned that homesickness and displacement compelled you to start writing following your traumatic experience of leaving Sudan for Scotland in the 1990s. Do you still feel that urgency in your work today, or have your motivations evolved?

I think of my inspiration as a triangular pool. One angle is Islam, and the other two are Scotland and Sudan. I am always moving within this pool, and although this pool is clearly marked, it also has a bottomless depth.

There is so much that fascinates me, and there are unlimited ways of writing about Islam, Sudan and Scotland. Homesickness and displacement also carry many meanings.

I have recently been thinking a lot about ageing and how older people must start to move to the sidelines so that the young can take centre stage. This is also a kind of displacement.   

You’ve said in the past that Islam is often misrepresented or exoticised in Western literature and that Eurocentric literature is also, in large part, Christian-centric. How do you navigate writing Muslim characters in a way that feels authentic without catering to stereotypes or feeling that you have to represent or uphold a certain depiction of Islam? 

As much as possible, I resist the temptation to ‘write back’, to explain, to justify or to argue. I don’t set out to challenge stereotypes or push back against certain Islamophobic narratives – although the work does end up doing so.

I start organically, leading rather than responding. I don’t want to be always looking over my shoulder; this would make the writing self-conscious. 

It’s always been important for me to centre Islam in my fiction and to write about characters who are practising Muslims. I want to do more than present Islam as a culture. I want it to pervade the novel, giving it its logic and deeper meaning.  

In your last novel, River Spirit (2023), which retraces the period of the Mahdi revolution through the eyes of ordinary Sudanese people, we come to grips with the aspirations and delusions that often accompany popular uprisings. A few years ago, Sudanese youth marched on the streets to overthrow the Omar al-Bashir regime. How do you recall living that moment and its unfolding aftermath?

I was not in Sudan when the protests started in 2018/2019, so I was watching from afar. It was an inspiring and optimistic time, as if the walls were coming down and Sudan was rejoining the world.

Sudan had been under sanctions for decades, and one of the positive outcomes of the uprisings was that these sanctions were lifted. This was cause for economic optimism.

Historically, Sudan has faced an identity dilemma, being neither African enough nor Arab enough, and has often been overshadowed by the more dominant cultures of Egypt and Ethiopia.

The uprising changed this perception and showed that the Sudanese have a distinctive culture and history. Certainly, on the world stage, there was an assertion of Sudanese identity. The youth also expressed their creativity and ambitions for a democratic, civilian-led government. But then all these dreams and beauty were shattered.

The uprising was a risk that didn’t pay off. The worst-case scenario came to pass – war, displacement, and famine on a massive scale. It has been catastrophic.

In Khartoum, where I grew up, they are now slowly rebuilding and fixing the damage done by the war. My Sudanese publisher, Dar al Musawarat, has reopened their bookshop.

On Facebook, I watch videos of student volunteers clearing up the rubble in hospitals, schools, and universities. They are carrying the collective mood of the uprising; they have not been crushed.

Farah Abdessamad is a New York City-based essayist/critic from France and Tunisia

Follow her on X: @farahstlouis