Writers Unlimited's video: VIDEOREADING SULAIMAN ADDONIA - Winternachten 2021 Writers Unlimited

On request of the Winternachten international literature festival The Hague the Eritrean-Ethiopian author Sulaiman Addonia gave a voice to beloved non-humans who, in his view, should have one. The authors' readings of his story was filmed on location, in his own habitat by Shalan Alhamwy and premiered at the festival in the program : Tout-Monde (Whole World) on Saturday 16 January 2021. The image that we have of our world is purely human: a human-centred picture. It's up to us to give non-humans a voice and a stage. In this program created by Nisrine Mbarki, we give the floor to the non-human elements of our world. It was an existentially poetic evening in which the world was experienced from a different, more complete, perspective. Sulaiman Addonia is a Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. His first novel, The Consequences of Love (2008), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and translated into more than 20 languages, is a love story set in Jeddah. Silence is My Mother Tongue (2018), his second novel, has been longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. This second novel tells of Saba, a girl in an East African refugee camp. Devoid of school and books, she struggles to give meaning to her own existence and to protect her brother. Both resist the roles imposed by their gender and environment. Addonia currently lives in Brussels, where he has launched the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (in Exile), a creative-writing academy for refugees and asylum seekers. Together with Specimen Press, he co-founded a new literary competition and prize for hybrid and collective writing: To Speak Europe in Different Languages.