1944 – 1989

Poet and scholar Muhammed Abdel-Hai was born in Khartoum to a middle-class family. His father was an engineer for the land registry and the family travelled extensively during his youth. He attended Khartoum University initially as a medical student and then as a student in the English department. He graduated in 1967 and continued his graduate study at Leeds University and Oxford Unversity. He returned to Sudan and was appointed as the head of the English department at Khartoum University in 1978. He died at forty-six in 1989.
Muhammed Abdel-Hai published five collections of poetry as well as plays and literary criticism. He is best known for the poem Returning to Sinnar (1973).