Meet the author: Sulaiman Addonia
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Meet the author
The meetings with writers at Passa Porta, prepared with passion, courage and thoroughness, are more than simply the presentation of literary works. We seek to achieve a genuine connection between writer and reader, and among readers themselves.
Go to overviewPresentation of The Seers, the relentless new novel by Brussels-based Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist.
Hannah, the main character of Sulaiman Addonia’s new novel The Seers, possesses a voice that holds you spellbound from the first sentence of the book to the last. By the end of this 160-page single paragraph, you might feel like a boxer after winning a fight in a ring: broken but euphoric. Peter Verhelst will tell us why the book is ‘world-class’ and Melissa Giardina will talk to the author. Actress Aminata Demba will read from it.
London
Sulaiman Addonia’s first novel, The Consequences of Love, was set in Saudi Arabia, where he spent his teenage years. For the follow-up to that novel, Silence Is My Mother Tongue, Addonia went back even further, to his childhood, setting the novel in a refugee camp in Sudan. Both books were nominated for renowned literary awards. The Seers takes us to London, where Addonia lived until 2009. We follow Hannah, a homeless refugee from Eritrea, in her first weeks in the capital of the UK, as she makes her way through bureaucracy and explores sexual boundaries in a Bloomsbury park.
Lockdown
Addonia wrote the book in Brussels during lockdown, working on his iPhone during walks in a park in Ixelles. The story grew out of an inner urge and the first draft was ready in the space of three weeks. A raw, erotic story about colonialism and intergenerational trauma in which the author flirts recklessly with the limits of his creative freedom, making for a reading experience that is both challenging and chastening.
Acclaim
here too the reactions of early readers have been overwhelming. Stefan Hertmans, Elvis Peeters and Alara Adilow all praised the work, while Peter Verhelst claimed, ‘How compelling and elegant and poignant and witty and full of vitality! And what a wealth of images! World-class, no doubt about it.’ On 10 October, Verhelst will introduce the book. Afterwards, Sulaiman Addonia will talk to Melissa Giardina about his work. Actress Aminata Demba will bring the main character from The Seers to life by reading some excerpts.
About the authors
Sulaiman Addonia (1972) is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. As a child, he lived in refugee camps in Sudan and Saudi Arabia. As an unaccompanied minor he travelled to London, where he studied and made his debut as an author. His first novel, The Consequences of Love, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2021 he published Silence Is My Mother Tongue. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Addonia now lives in Brussels, where he runs a creative writing school for refugees and asylum seekers.
Peter Verhelst (b. 1962) is a widely acclaimed Flemish poet, novelist and theatre-maker. His breakthrough came in 2000 with his novel Tongkat, which earned him major literary prizes in Flanders and the Netherlands. In 2018 he won the first Sybren Polet Prize for his entire oeuvre. In 2021 he received the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his ‘breathtaking oeuvre’. In 2022 he was awarded the Ark Prize of the Free Word. Zabriskie, his latest poetry collection, earned him The Great Poetry Prize.
Melissa Giardina is the face of Vindetta!, a company she founded in 2020 that unites everything she loves: moderating (fiction & non-fiction), interviewing (fiction & non-fiction), editing, translating (EN/NL/FR/IT), PR and communicating. She is also a voracious reader, keen on beauty and eager to be astonished. For many years she worked as a bookseller. Her roots are in Brussels but she lives and reads in Ghent.
Aminata Demba is an actress, presenter, moderator and artistic team member / maker with the non-profit theatre company Laika vzw. In recent years, she has also appeared as a maker and performer in various theatre productions at NT Gent, KVS, Bronks and Theater Antigone, among others. Besides her acting career, she is the driving force behind RepresentBelgium, an initiative to make our visual culture more inclusive in the audiovisual sector. She is also in demand as a moderator, covering a range of themes.
Org. Passa Porta