Books from South Sudan

A Long Walk to Water tells two parallel stories set in Sudan, separated by more than two decades. In 2008, a girl named Nya walks two hours each way to collect water from a pond, making the trip twice every day. In 1985, a boy named Salva is eleven years old when civil war reaches his village, forcing him away from his family. The two narratives alternate section by section, gradually revealing how they connect.

Salva's story follows his years as one of the displaced Dinka children who crossed enormous distances on foot through southern Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya, searching for safety. These young refugees, often called the lost boys of Sudan, faced hunger, exhaustion, and constant danger over months and years of walking. The novel is based on the real life of Salva Dut, who eventually reached the United States in 1996 and later started a project to build water wells in Sudan.

Linda Sue Park, a Newbery Medal recipient, structures the book around the daily reality of water. Nya's repetitive journey to the pond and Salva's long displacement across borders both center on survival at its most basic level. The book is short and direct, written for younger readers but grounded in documented events.

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Edo's Souls follows three characters whose lives are shaped by civil war in Sudan. Lucy-Eghino grows up in a village in the south during the 1970s. When rumors of approaching violence reach her community, she is forced to leave, traveling first to Juba and then north to Khartoum. Her story traces the distance between a childhood home and the places where safety might be found.

Marco, a quiet young father, struggles each day to hold his family together while navigating tense relations with northerners. Peter, a soldier caught between competing obligations, is ordered to conduct night raids in search of rebel groups. Neither man has chosen his position freely, and both face pressures that leave little room for hesitation.

Stella Gaitano, a South Sudanese author, sets this multi-generational story against the long period of conflict between Sudan's north and south. The three perspectives offer different angles on displacement, loyalty, and survival during a war that reshaped the region over decades. Each character occupies a distinct social position, and the novel moves between their separate circumstances rather than following a single path through the conflict.

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Literary Sudans is an anthology edited by Bhakti Shringarpure that collects fiction and other writings from Sudan and South Sudan. The book brings together work by both established and emerging Sudanese writers, offering a window into the literary culture of two countries that were, until 2011, a single nation. The collection includes translated texts, presented in a style described as clear and faithful to the tone of the originals.

The anthology opens with an introduction by Taban Lo Liyong, a Sudanese literary figure known across East Africa, and closes with an afterword by Shringarpure that provides historical and cultural context for the works gathered inside. The range of voices and styles in the collection reflects the diversity of communities across Sudan and South Sudan, regions shaped by different languages, traditions, and experiences. By placing these writings side by side, the book maps a literary landscape that is rarely visible in a single volume outside the region.

Sudan and South Sudan together span an enormous stretch of northeast Africa, from the Sahara in the north to tropical forests near the equator. The partition of 2011 divided the territory along lines that did not always follow cultural or linguistic boundaries, a context that gives the anthology a particular weight as a shared literary record.

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There Is a Country is an anthology of eight short works by South Sudanese writers, edited by Nyuol Lueth Tong. It stands as the first published collection of its kind from South Sudan, a nation that gained independence from Sudan in July 2011, making it the youngest internationally recognized country at the time of publication. The anthology draws on the experiences of writers shaped by decades of civil conflict and forced migration, subjects that run through much of the collection.

The stories cover a range of personal and collective ground. Some center on youth, family, and love; others address loss and the realities of life during and after prolonged war. Because the authors write from within or close to the events they describe, the pieces carry a directness that comes from proximity rather than outside observation. The collection addresses both the past and the present of a country whose written literary tradition in English remains small and difficult to access outside the region.

South Sudan's borders were formally drawn along the old provincial boundaries of British-era Sudan. The anthology's title echoes a quiet insistence on national existence, and the eight pieces together form an early public record of South Sudanese voices in published fiction and nonfiction.

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