Adil al-Qassas began to write short stories in the early 1980s, but was not able to publish them until 1985, after the collapse of an oppressive military dictatorship. His work represented a new literary sensibility, distinguished by its combined aesthetics of poetry, narration, and visual arts; literary critics in Sudan compared his texts to paintings and films. He published his first short story collection, This Silence Has the Rattle of Your Absence, in 2002 in Cairo. Currently, al-Qassas lives in Australia, where he is a doctoral candidate in postcolonial studies at Victoria University.