Reading
Olga Grjasnowa & Sulaiman Addonia

Flight Recorders

Thu, 22.08.2019
3:30 PM - 16:30 Edinburgh Int. Book Festival

Azeri author Olga Grjasnowa moved to Germany in 1996 as a refugee and is married to a Syrian actor – her novel ‘City of Jasmine’ offers an intimate picture of the inhumanity of war as three Damascenes flee.

Sulaiman Addonia fled Eritrea in 1976 and spent his early life in a Sudanese refugee camp. Those days form ‘Silence Is My Mother Tongue’, which also explores gender identity and a close sibling relationship.

They discuss lives lived in exile.

Olga Grjasnowa was born into a Russian-Jewish family in Baku, Azerbaijan. She and her family came to Hessen, Germany, in 1996. Grjasnowa started learning German when she was 11 years old. In 2010, she obtained her bachelor’s degree in the “Creative Writing“ program offered by the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig.  After studying abroad in Poland, Russia (at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute), and Israel, Grjasnowa took up dance studies at the Free University of Berlin. In 2012, she received the “Klaus-Michael Kühne“ and “Anna Seghers“ awards for her critically acclaimed debut novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt. Olga Grjasnowa is married to Syrian actor Ayham Majid Agha, with whom she has one daughter.