Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi is one of the leading African poets writing in Arabic today. He has gained a wide audience in his native Sudan for his imaginative approach to poetry and for the delicacy and emotional frankness of his lyrics. His poetry has always been concerned with the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of Sudan and its complex history. Saddiq was born in 1969 and grew up in Omdurman Khartoum where he lived until forced into exile in 2012. From 2006, he was the cultural editor of Al-Sudani newspaper until he was sacked from his position for political reasons (along with 22 other colleagues) in July 2012 during the uprising against the dictatorship of Omar Al-Bashir. Saddiq only escaped imprisonment because, thanks to the miraculous timing of the Poetry Parnassus festival at London's Southbank Centre (the world's largest ever gathering of international poets at which Saddiq represented Sudan), he was in the UK when a series of mass arrests took place. He successfully applied for asylum and is now living in London. Saddiq's first poetry collection Songs of Solitude was published in 1996 (second edition, 1999). He has also published The Sultan's Labyrinth (1996) and The Far Reaches of the Screen... (1999 & 2000); all three collections were published in one volume as Saddiq's collected poems in Cairo in 2009.