Sulaiman Addonia and Hanne De Backer
The central theme of the Klarafestival 2026 is, Where Is Home? Eritrean-Ethiopian-British Brussels resident Sulaiman Addonia gives us his answer in a performance with musician Hanne De Backer. Alicja Gescinska will then talk to Addonia.
In co-production with Klarafestival
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this programme is accessible to people with reduced mobility.
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the seers
Sulaiman Addonia was born in Eritrea, spent his childhood in Sudan and Saudi Arabia, fled to London with his brother as a teenager and has now been living for some time with his family in Brussels, where he founded the Creative Writing Academy for Refugees and Asylum Seekers and the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile). With The Seers, Sulaiman Addonia wrote a novel that gets under your skin. In the heart of London, while waiting for her asylum application to be processed, the Eritrean Hannah comes home to her body.
‘The violence that marks the world’s outcasts becomes, in this compelling prose, an ode to the strength to survive. What an intense and passionate book.’
musical performance
Specially for the Klarafestival, Sulaiman Addonia wrote a reflection on the central theme, Where Is Home?, which will open the festival on 19 March at Passa Porta. Renowned improvisational musician Hanne De Backer, who plays the baritone saxophone and bass clarinet, will accompany the lecture, supporting and reinforcing the rhythm of Addonia’s words with her music. After the performance, Sulaiman Addonia will discuss his lecture and his work with writer and philosopher Alicja Gescinska.
about the artists
Sulaiman Addonia (b. 1972) is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. As a child, he lived in refugee camps in Sudan and Saudi Arabia. He came to London as an unaccompanied minor, 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 released 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.
Hanne De Backer is a Brussels-based baritone saxophonist and bass clarinettist. She is an energetic and versatile performer, mainly active in the field of improvised music, and who has made her mark on the European improvisation scene in recent years. She is the founder of the collective g a b b r o, for which she acts as both musician and artistic and production manager. She is currently part of several active bands and projects ranging from improvised to composed and contemporary music.
about the interviewer
Alicja Gescinska (b. 1981 in Warsaw) is a writer and philosopher. She writes novels, essays and poetry and has received several awards for her work, including the Debuut Prize and the Liberales Book Prize. In 2025 she published the novella De gezichtslozen about a photographer who visits a refugee camp in Beirut. That same year, she released Vrouwen in duistere tijden, ten biographical portraits of courageous and intelligent women, including Rosa Luxemburg, Anna Akhmatova, Hannah Arendt and Barbara Skarga.
pictures: hanne de backer © olympe tits, sulaiman addonia © fred de brock
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