The Seers

With echoes of Zora Neale Hurston and Clarice Lispector, Sulaiman Addonia turns from the broader immigration narrative of land and nations to look closely at the erotic and intimate lives of asylum seekers.

Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, The Seers chronicles the first weeks of a young Eritrean refugee in London. As Hannah grapples with her own agency in a strange country, her sexual encounters become an unapologetic expression of self--a defiant cry against the endless bureaucracy of immigration.

In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of a life being burned up in search of refuge. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the UK asylum system, the West is both savior and abuser, seeking always to shape her, but never succeeding in suppressing her voice.

Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. He spent his early life in a refugee camp and went on to earn an MA from the University of London. His first novel, The Consequences of Love (Chatto & Windus, 2008), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and 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. Addonia currently lives in Brussels where he founded the Creative Writing Academy for Refugees & Asylum Seekers and the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival In Exile.