Eddos goldenes Lächeln (Edo’s Souls)

Eddos goldenes Lächeln is a many-layered, feminist portrait of survival and death in complex family constellations across multiple generations. In pointed terms, it outlines the links between civil war, flight, military dictatorship, and colonialism—by both European Christians and North Sudanese Muslims—highlighting their particular impact on South Sudanese women. Gaitano engages incisively with motherhood, between care, loss, and disquiet, also using her characters to critically examine patriarchal notions of maternity. Female pleasure appears in its own right, no longer tied to reproduction. The focus on smells lends the text an urgent, poetic language that gives shape to sensory perception. Influenced by South Sudanese oral traditions, Gaitano masterfully combines realism and myth. The German translation persuasively recreates this approach, in particular its rhythm and sound. In this way, the novel develops an impressive polyphony of different North and South Sudanese narrative modes that also shows how experiences of flight and violence alter language.
—Melody Makeda Ledwon

Stella Gaitano  (born 1979 in Khartoum) is a writer and human rights activist. She began writing early and published short stories in Arabic. Her debut novel Edo’s Souls (2018) was the first South Sudanese novel to win a PEN Translates Award. Gaitano’s literature is centred on war, displacement and identity. Since 2022 she has been living in exile in Germany.

Larissa Bender (born 1958 in Cologne) works a translator and teacher of Arabic and as a journalist. She has edited two anthologies on politics and culture in Syria, where she spent several years. In 2025, her translation of the novel The Shell: Memoirs of a Hidden Observer by the Syrian writer Mustafa Khalifa won the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding.