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Biography
Sulaiman S.M.Y. Addonia (Tigrinya: ሱላእማን ኣድዶንኣ) is an author residing in Brussels. He was born to an Eritrean mother and an Ethiopian father in Eritrea. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan, following the Om Hajer massacre in 1975. In his early teens, he lived and studied in Saudi Arabia. He sought asylum with his brother in London in 1990, and studied at the University College London.
Addonia's first novel, entitled The Consequences of Love (published by Chatto & Windus, 2008), is a love story set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Naser, a 20 year old refugee from Eritrea, falls in love when a veiled woman, who drops a note at his feet. She identifies herself by a pair of pink shoes, and the two embark on an epistolary romance, hoping to meet face to face. They live in fear that the religious police may learn of their illegal romance.
His second novel, Silence is my Mother Tongue (published by The Indigo Press, 2018), is long-listed for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.