In 2021, our author talks moved online due to the COVID19-epidemic. In the discussion seminars of our master’s courses, we were joined by Chika Unigwe and Sulaiman Addonia.
“Chika Unigwe is a Nigerian writer who now lives in the United States. She is the author of four novels, as well as numerous short stories and essays. In 1996, she obtained an MA in English from the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL), and then earned a PhD from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, in 2004, for her dissertation entitled “In the Shadow of Ala: Igbo Women Writing as an Act of Righting”. Chika is Creative Director of the Awele Creative Trust, and she was a judge for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. In 2016-2017, she was Bonderman Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University, Providence RI, USA, and then went on to lecture in creative writing at Emory University, GA. Over the years, Chika has received many prestigious awards and distinctions. A selection of these include:
Winner of the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition for the short story “Borrowed Smile”; Nominated for the 2004 Caine Prize for African writing, for the short story “The Secret”; Winner of the 2012 NLNG Prize for Literature, for the novel On Black Sisters’ Street.
“Sulaiman Addonia is a novelist who fled Eritrea as a refugee in childhood. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan following the Om Hajar massacre in 1976, and in his early teens he lived and studied 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. The Consequences of Love was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was translated into more than 20 languages.
Sulaiman Addonia currently lives in Brussels where he has launched a creative writing academy for refugees and asylum seekers & the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile) that debuted at Bozar in Feb 2019, in collaboration with the Afropolitan Festival & Ixelles Commune. Silence is My Mother Tongue, his second novel, has been longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.”
https://www.crossingborders-stimmenafrikas.de/en/gaeste/sulaiman-addonia-er-be
