Jayli Abdel Rahman

Jayli Abdel Rahman was born in Saai Island in northern Sudan. At the age of nine, he migrated to Egypt to join his father. He studied at al-Azhar and later in Moscow where he pursued post-graduate studies in arts. Rahman is regarded as one of the pioneers of the foot poem in the Arab world, which heralded a major departure from the ages-long traditional poetry. He is also credited with translating a large volume of Russian poetry into Arabic. He left behind two published and three unpublished collections. Some of his poems appeared in Modern Sudanese Poetry: An Anthology (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).