Hassan Kassim is a Mombasa-based Kenyan writer and Kiswahili literary translator. A beneficiary of the PenPen residency by the European Union(2020), Two Lines Press’ Swahili Translation Workshop (2023) and American Literary Translators Association(ALTA) BIPOC Translation workshop(2023). He has been longlisted for the inaugural Toyin Falola Prize, won the 2022 Mozilla Common-voice Essay prize and was shortlisted for the 2024 StingingFly Emerging Translators grant. His other publication credits appear internationally in Lolwe, Words without Borders, BrittlePaper, Asymptote, Hekaya, Africa in Dialogue, Yabaleft Review, Jalada’s second translation issue and The Standard. His translation of Jalada’s Mgeni was published in ‘No Edges’ by Two Lines Press, later picked up by Tilted Axis Press in the UK

Hassan has extensive experiences in research consultancy having been an independent contractor for Global Development Incubator(GDI) for their Skills Anticipation Study(2020), Kenya National Bureau of Statistics(KNBS), IEBC, Globe Augment(2023); Consulting for Coastal Bottlers in their every-dealer Survey, utilising augmented reality to enable better route optimisation and DAIR Institute (2024) for building Kiswahili language tools capturing dialectic nuances.

He works in the Maritime industry following his undergraduate degree in Maritime Management, passionate about history, youth dialogue and grassroot intellectual movements, which has led him to playing executive roles in several Community-based Organisations in Mombasa for more than 5 years, in recognition of which was partisan to many competitive regional leadership programs from the YALI(Young African Leadership Initiative) by the American Embassy, the Ubuntu Leadership Association by the Portuguese Embassy and the year-long Presidential Leadership Program by the Global Peace Foundation.

He volunteers for the Royal Commonwealth Society, where since 2022 he’s been judging the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition.