An evening with Sulaiman Addonia

‘The Seers is an incandescent howl of anti-colonial rage and insatiable desire…and a scathing indictment of the UK asylum system’s ability to break hearts and bodies to pieces again and again.’ – Preti Taneja

Lighthouse Bookshop is thrilled to bring Sulaiman Addonia, the critically acclaimed novelist and trailblazer for African and refugee stories to Edinburgh, where we discover what lies at the intersections of liberating borders and sexuality.

We're delighted to host this event as part of Flip Through Flanders, presented by Flanders Literature.

The Speaker

Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan, and his early teens 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.

His first novel, The Consequences of Love (Chatto & Windus, 2008), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was translated into more than 20 languages. His second novel, Silence is My Mother Tongue (Indigo Press, 2019; Graywolf, 2020), was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards 2021, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, the inaugural African Literary Award from The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, and longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Fiction. Addonia currently lives in Brussels where he founded the Creative Writing Academy for Refugees & Asylum Seekers and the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival In Exile (AALFIE), selected in 2022 as one of the top 40 literary festivals in the world. In 2021 he was awarded Belgium’s Golden Afro Artistic Award for Literature and in 2022 he was elected as a Fellow of Royal Society of Literature (RSL).

About the Book

Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, The Seers grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, presenting gender-fluid, trans and androgynous African immigrants, and insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.

Hannah arrives in London with her mother’s diary, containing a disturbing sexual story taking place in Keren, Eritrea, where the Allies defeated the Italians in the Second World War.

In a gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories, colonial trauma, and the realities of the UK asylum system and its impact on young refugees.