Awards

• Long-listed for RSL Ondaatje Prize 2026 (UK)

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9781913513511

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Reviews

Praise for Silence is My Mother Tongue: ‘The exchange of masculine and feminine roles within the context of a sexually conservative culture makes for a gripping and courageous narrative.’ – The Guardian; ‘Addonia, who spent his own early life in a Sudanese refugee camp, has a unique & intelligent voice which makes sensual evocative poetry of the deepest, fiercest emotions.’ – The Big Issue; 'Mesmerizing and provocative... Addonia writes with poetry and depth. His sentences are vessels for what has been lost.’ – Triangle House

Praise for Silence is My Mother Tongue: 'The exchange of masculine and feminine roles within the context of a sexually conservative culture makes for a gripping and courageous narrative.' - The Guardian; 'Addonia, who spent his own early life in a Sudanese refugee camp, has a unique & intelligent voice which makes sensual evocative poetry of the deepest, fiercest emotions.' - The Big Issue; 'Mesmerizing and provocative... Addonia writes with poetry and depth. His sentences are vessels for what has been lost.' - Triangle House

Author Information

Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan, and in his early teens he lived 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 Lambda Literary Awards 2021, Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, the inaugural African Literary Award from The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, and longlisted for 2019 Orwell Prize for Fiction. Addonia's essays appear in LitHub, Granta, Freeman's, New York Times, De Standaard and Passa Porta. He is a contributor to Tales of Two Planets (Penguin, 2020, edited by John Freeman) and Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Books, 2020, edited by Maaza Mengiste). Sulaiman 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).

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