Sofia Samatar is the author of five books, most recently the memoir The White Mosque. Her works include the award-winning epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria and Monster Portraits, an exploration of monsters in collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Obsidian, The White Review, North American Review, The Paris Review Daily, The New Inquiry, Research in African Literatures, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into eleven languages. She holds a PhD in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied modern Arabic literature and wrote a dissertation on the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih. Samatar’s collaborative study of literature with Kate Zambreno, Tone, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2023. Her science fiction novella The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, a story of universities, carceral systems, and breath, is forthcoming from Tor.com in 2024. Sofia Samatar lives in Virginia and teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University, where she is Roop Distinguished Professor of English.
Originally published at english.nd.edu.