‘A memoir of rare beauty’ NURUDDIN FARAH ‘The book held me spellbound’ MAGDI EL GIZOULI https://stillsudan.blogspot.com ‘I enjoyed the book and found it revealing and interesting. I admired the modesty with which he represented what was in a fact a life of considerable achievement.’ ABDULRAZAK GURNAH Winner of the Nobel prize for literature 2023 ‘A rare and moving memoir . . . should delight any reader who cherishes a well-told story’ JOANNA OYEDIRAN Sudan Studies ‘The book is a mesmerising account of a childhood that was simultaneously paradisal and hellish’ ROBERT IRWIN The Times Literary Supplement A young man's pursuit of knowledge in a world of sheikhs, matriarchs, camel-raiders, poets and night-hunters. In this absorbing account of growing up in a nomadic society in twentieth-century Sudan, Hamid Dirar takes the reader from his ancestral homeland in Nubia, the land of rocks, to the seasonal settlements of the Butana, the great grass plain where he grew up. It’s a realm of violence and beauty, famine and plenitude, a place with its own laws, where the modern world is a speck on the horizon - until a military coup in Sudan changes the course of the author's life. Hamid Dirar is author of the classic The Indigenous Fermented Foods of the Sudan (1993). He died at his home in Bahri (Khartoum North) on 23 April 2023.