Sulaiman Addonia
Sulaiman Addonia (1972) is an Eritrean-British writer. His first book, The Consequences of Love, was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has been translated into more than 20 languages.
His second novel Silence is my Mother Tongue was nominated for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Sulaiman Addonia is also the initiator of the Creative Writing – Academy for refugees, a project in which people with a refugee background follow a writing course. He also organises literary public events. Last year, the first edition of the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile), which he founded, focused on pan-African literature. At that time the central themes were African feminism, migration experiences in Europe, free love and radical ideas. Sulaiman is also co-founder of a new literature prize: Specimen Press and To Speak Europe in Different Languages: Hybrid and collective writing competition.
Sulaiman was born to an Ethiopian father and an Eritrean mother. In 1976, he fled with his family to a refugee camp in Sudan, where his father was murdered. Together with his mother and younger brother, moved to Saudi Arabia, where he spent his childhood and studied development cooperation and economics. He now lives with his family in Ixelles, Brussels.
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