Fatin Abbas was born in Khartoum, Sudan. She gained her BA in English from the University of Cambridge (UK), her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University (USA), and her MFA in Fiction from Hunter College, the City University of New York (USA), where she was awarded both the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize and the Miriam Weinberg Richter Award for her writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta: The Magazine of New Writing, The Warwick Review, Freeman’s: The Best New Writing on Arrival, and Friction. Her non-fiction writing and journalism have appeared in Le Monde diplomatique, Die Zeit, The Nation, African Arguments and openDemocracy, among other places. Her novel, Ghost Season, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in the United States and Canada.

She has been a Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany), an Austrian Federal Chancellery/KulturKontakt Artist-in-Residence (Vienna, Austria), a Maison Baldwin St-Paul-de-Vence Writer-in-Residence (St-Paul-de-Vence, France) as well as a Jan Michalski Foundation Writer-in-Residence, and has taught as a Guest Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Bard College Berlin and as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing at the Pratt Institute (New York).