[1] Later, he moved with his family to the village of Wad El-Bor in the state of Al Jazirah in central Sudan, where he received his primary education.

When he returned to Sudan, he was appointed as lecturer in the department for Russian language in the Faculty of Arts at Khartoum University.

After protests against the military government of Omar al-Bashir in the early 1990s, he was expelled from that university, along with other lecturers and hundreds of students.

In 2012, he was awarded the El-Tayeb Salih Prize for Creative Writing in Arabic by the Sudanese ministry of culture.

[4][5][6] In a review, this story was characterised as follows: "...the winning story is one that explores through metaphor and an altered, inventive mode of perception – including, for the first time in the Caine Prize, illustration – the allure of, and relentless threats to freedom.