[2] This novel, that takes place during the Mahdist state, and several of his stories have appeared in English translation, including the anthology The Book of Khartoum,[3] as well as in Banipal magazine.
[7] His third novel The Drowning, translated by Paul G. Starkey, presents the social repercussions in a Sudanese rural town by the river Nile after a military coup in the capital in 1968, a few months before the end of the democratic era during the government of President Ismail al-Azhari.
[8] The paradise river carried wooden boats, conquerors’ barges, the corpses of the drowned, and the victims of massacres.
Married couples, children after circumcision, and women after childbirth plunged into it….The paradise river often dried up and destroyed.
But every time it went back to what it had been: a gentle river, coming from paradise.Tahia Abdel Nasser, one of the judges for the Naguib Mahfouz Prize wrote about The Longing of the Dervish:[1] It gestures to a new Sudanese literature with its intricately woven history, exploration of race, and its richly layered intertexts.