Sulaiman Addonia

(Eritrea, 1975) is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. His first novel, The Consequences of Love (2008), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and translated into more than 20 languages, is a love story set in Jeddah. Silence is My Mother Tongue (2018) was longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. This second novel is about Saba, a girl in an East African refugee camp. Devoid of school and books, she struggles to give meaning to her own existence and to protect her brother. Both resist the roles imposed by their gender and environment. Addonia currently lives in Brussels, where he established the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (in Exile), a creative-writing academy for refugees and asylum seekers. Together with Specimen Press, he co-founded a new literary competition and prize for hybrid and collective writing: To Speak Europe in Different Languages.