Stella Gaitano is a South Sudanese writer, journalist and human rights activist. She grew up in Khartoum and studied pharmacy there. Her formative literary influences include Sudanese author At-Tayyib Salih as well as Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. She writes her works in Arabic.
For her early story «A Lake the Size of a Papaya Fruit», she received the Ali El-Mek Literary Prize. Her first short story collection, «Withered Flowers» (2004), depicts the fate of people who fled the conflicts in South Sudan, Darfur and the Nuba Mountains and live in refugee camps near Khartoum. After the founding of the state of South Sudan in 2011, Gaitano lost her Sudanese citizenship and moved to Juba in 2012, where she worked as a pharmacist and continued writing. Her second short story collection, «The Return» (2015), deals with the return of many South Sudanese from the north and their hopes and disappointments. In 2015, Gaitano had to return to Khartoum and was again threatened and attacked because of her human rights work in Darfur. Her debut novel «Eddo’s Souls» (2018) was the first South Sudanese novel to receive a PEN Translates Award, in 2020, and tells the story of several generations between South Sudan and Khartoum from the 1960s onward. Since 2022, Gaitano has lived in exile in Germany as a fellow of the German PEN Centre’s Writers-in-Exile programme.
In 2024, her first short story collection in German, «Endlose Tage am Point Zero», translated by Günther Orth, was published and selected for the Litprom list of recommended books. In October 2025, she was named a «Writer of Courage» by Leila Aboulela; her novel «Ireme» was among the first winners of the PEN Presents x International Booker Prize that September. In 2024, the English translation of her debut novel followed under the title «Edo’s Souls», translated by Sawad Husain. Gaitano lives and works in Kamen, Germany.
Last Update: 2026