Abdilatif Abdalla is a Kenyan poet, publicist and university lecturer. He is considered one of the best-known Swahili poets of the present day. Abdalla was born in Mombasa and grew up with his grandfather. In the late 1960s, Abdalla was politically active, including writing and publishing the pamphlet “Kenya: Twendapi?” (Kenya, where are we going?) to support the opposition Kenya’s People’s Union (KPU). In the course of a wave of arrests and the dismantling of the KPU, Abdalla was arrested on 20 December 1968. On charges of conspiracy and sedition, Abdalla was imprisoned for three years. During his imprisonment, Abdalla wrote numerous poems, which were published after the end of his imprisonment in the anthology “Sauti ya Dhiki”. For his anthology he received the Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 1972. In 1972, Abdalla went into exile in Tanzania, where he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Swahili at the University of Dar-es-Salaam. He was also active as a journalist and edited the magazine “Mulika”, as well as publishing numerous poems in Tanzanian newspapers. In 1979, Abdalla moved to London to work for the BBC World Service's Swahili service. He wrote and translated news reports, among other things, and also produced and presented the weekly arts and culture programme “Utamaduni”. From 1986 to 1994, he also edited Africa Events magazine, an international magazine focusing on current affairs and Africa. Since 1995, Abdalla has taught Swahili at the University of Leipzig.

In 2021, Abdalla Abdilatif took part in the Cluster’s international workshop “Intermedial Indian Ocean”.