Having spent most of her youth with her family in New York City and for academic studies in the United Kingdom and the US, she has become known for her essays and non-fiction writing about Sudan, as well as for her short stories and her 2023 debut novel Ghost season.
This not only points to the kind of discrimination that South Sudanese have had to suffer at the hands of northerners, it also indicates the extent to which the legacy of slavery continued to inform structures of economic, political and social inequality long after the official abolishment of the practice in 1924, and the country’s independence in 1956.In an article published in German, she told the history of Khartoum from the anti-colonial Mahdist state in the latter half of the 19th century to the breaking away of South Sudan from the northern part of the country under the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir.
Her 2012 PhD thesis at Harvard was titled Class, Gender and Indigeneity as Counter-discourses in the African Novel: Achebe, Ngugi, Emecheta, Sow Fall and Ali.
[19] In a book review of Ghost Season for The New York Times, Eritrea-born British writer Sulaiman Addonia wrote that Abbas "mastered the courage to dive deep into Sudan’s wounds and taboos" and that "the stories of civilians in the grip of uncertainty make for a haunting account and a daring debut.
"[20] Further reviews appeared in the Sudanese 500 Words Magazine,[3] the New York Journal of Books,[21] the Orange County Register[1] and the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, which praised her "great care and attention to place and character.