Stella Gaitano, born in Khartoum in 1979 to a South Sudanese family, is a South Sudanese writer and human rights activist. She studied English and Arabic at the University of Khartoum and trained as a pharmacist. She began publishing short stories in Arabic at an early age – a deliberate decision aimed at reaching a wide audience in Sudan and beyond.
In her works, she explores the realities of life for people from South Sudan. War, displacement, discrimination, military dictatorship and questions of identity and belonging are at the heart of her literary work. Following South Sudan’s independence, she moved to Juba and also wrote about life in the fledgling state. Her publications include two collections of short stories and the novel Edo’s Souls, which was the first South Sudanese novel to win a PEN Translates Award and was published in English translation in 2023.
Due to her criticism of the South Sudanese government, Gaitano was forced to leave the country in 2015. In 2022, she found refuge in Germany as part of the German PEN Centre’s Writers-in-Exile programme, where she now lives and continues to campaign for human rights, democracy and education.