Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

At the end of August 2022, the Austrian city of Graz announced that Baraka Sakin had been nominated for its literary award Stadtschreiber von Graz (Town writer of Graz) for 2022/23. This award, for which 29 writers had currently applied, is intended to allow the prizewinners "to take a look at the city from the outside and to devote themselves to their further literary development." The jury explained the award with the following words: "In his novels, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin proves himself to be an astute observer of socio-economic realities and, last but not least, a convincing analyst of myths and ideologies. The narrator counters the inauthenticity of technocratic regimes and abstruse irrationalism with irony, satire and black humour.”

Several of his short stories were translated into German by Sudanese-Austrian writer Ishraga Mustafa. In September 2016, he was invited to Berlin as participant of the International Festival for Literature, and in 2019 to the festival of African literature Crossing Borders in Cologne, Germany. His novel The Messiah of Darfur was published in a German translation in October 2021. In a review for the German online portal Qantara, fellow writer Volker Kaminski wrote about the novel:

In 2011, Baraka Sakin received the Al-Tayeb Salih Prize for Creative Writing at the Khartoum book fair for his novel The Jungo – Stakes of the Earth, which deals with the conditions in a women's prison in El-Gadarif in eastern Sudan. Shortly after its release, the Sudanese authorities confiscated and banned his books. In 2012, Baraka Sakin left Sudan, seeking exile in Austria, where he has lived since 2012.

Following the original edition, his novel The Jungo – Stakes of the Earth was published in English and French translations. His short story A Woman from Kampo Kadees was included in the anthology Nouvelles du Soudan in 2010. The French translation of The Messiah of Darfur won the Prix Les Afriques in 2017. In France, he also published a children's book as a multilingual edition in Arabic, English and French.

His literary work, which speaks of marginalised people and war, with references to the Darfur genocide and the dictatorship in Sudan under Omar al-Bashir, is published in Arabic in Egypt. It is popular with Sudanese readers, who had been smuggling his books into their country after their interdiction in 2009. The Sudanese writer Ayman Bik called the novel The Messiah of Darfur "a great step forward, towards liberation from our historical ties with regards to the Darfur region, and regarding the systematic racism and the massacres committed in the region".

Baraka Sakin was awarded the BBC Short Story Prize for the Arab World for A Woman from Kampo Kadees in 1993, and in 2020, the Arab Literature Prize by the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris for the French translation of his novel The Jungo – Stakes of the Earth. Commenting on this award, he said in an interview: "...this prize came at just the right time because my novel talks about religious tolerance, love and humanity, where we now live in a world torn apart by identity struggles, going through what looks like a clash of civilizations.”

Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin (Arabic:عبد العزيز بركة ساكن, born in Kassala, Sudan, in 1963) is a Sudanese fiction writer with roots in Darfur in western Sudan, whose literary work was banned in Sudan in 2011. Since 2012, he has lived in exile in Austria. He is mostly known for his novels The Messiah of Darfur and The Jungo, translated from the original Arabic into French, English, Spanish and German.