Stella Gaitano was born in 1979 in Khartoum, Sudan, where she grew up before the separation of the south from Sudan. Gaitano speaks Latuka, English, and Arabic. At the University of Khartoum, she studied in English and modern standard Arabic. For her stories, her language of choice for writing is Arabic, which is not an official language of South Sudan. Currently living in Germany, Gaitano had moved to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, in 2012 following the country’s newfound independence. She now advocates for democracy and education from her base in Germany while pursuing her literary career.
She is known for her fiction which deals with the harsh living conditions of marginalised people from Sudan, who have endured discrimination and military dictatorship, or war and displacement, especially from the South to the northern part of Sudan. Since the independence of South Sudan in 2011, she has also published short stories about life in her new nation.
