ABOUT
Founded by Eritrean-Ethiopian author Sulaiman Addonia, the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile) is a new pan-African literary event with feminist principles at its heart. This festival aims to be a home for ideas that migrate freely and boldly in borderless literary landscapes. This will be a festival that reflects and celebrates our societies not as censored but as they exist in reality, with all their diversity, trouble and beauty. In collaboration with BOZAR, in the framework of the Afropolitan Festival 08-10- FEB. ’19, and supported by the Commune of Ixelle and Bib Sans Souci, it will debut on Friday 8 February 2019, in Brussels.
The first edition of the festival will launch with three events over two days, on African feminism, migration experiences in Europe, free love & radical ideas.
ABOUT SULAIMAN
SULAIMAN ADDONIA
Sulaiman Addonia is a British-Eritrean-Ethiopian novelist who fled Eritrea as a refugee in childhood. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan following the Om Hajar massacre in 1976, and in his early teens he lived and studied in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He arrived in London as an underage unaccompanied refugee without a word of English and went on to earn an MA in Development Studies from SOAS and a BSc in Economics from UCL. The Consequences of Love was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was translated into more than 20 languages.
Sulaiman Addonia currently lives in Brussels where he has launched a creative writing academy for refugees and asylum seekers. Silence is My Mother Tongue, his second novel, is published by The Indigo Press.