Charles Neufeld

Born in 1856 in West Prussia, he later became widely known in English as Charles Neufeld, though he is also referred to as Karl Neufeld. He was a German merchant and traveler whose life took a dramatic turn when he was imprisoned in Omdurman, in Sudan, for many years during the Mahdist period.

That ordeal became the basis of his best-known book, A Prisoner of the Khaleefa: Twelve Years' Captivity at Omdurman. Readers have long been drawn to it for its direct, eyewitness account of captivity, politics, and daily life in a turbulent era. The book helped secure his reputation as a memorable writer of adventure and survival.

Neufeld died in 1918. Today he is remembered less as a conventional literary figure than as a remarkable witness: a man whose writing preserves the tension, danger, and strange human detail of a world few of his readers would ever have seen firsthand.