We warmly welcome you to an evening of readings by poet and activist-scholar Nat Raha and novelist Sulaiman Addonia. They will read excerpts from their latest books, apparitions (nines) by Nat Raha and The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia. The reading will be followed by a conversation between both authors. 

Schedule
19:30 - 21:30 Readings

About apparitions (nines)
Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of  “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.

Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/apparitions-nines

About Nat Raha
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (2018), countersonnets (2013), and Octet (2010). Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems (2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018), on Poem-a-Day, and in South Atlantic Quarterly, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Transgender Marxism,and Wasafiri Magazin. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.

About The Seers
The Seers follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.

Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/the-seers

About Sulaiman Addonia
Sulaiman Addonia is a British-Eritrean-Ethiopian author based in Belgium. His novels, The Consequences of Love (2008) and Silence is My Mother Tongue (2019), have been translated into more than twenty languages. Silence is My Mother Tongue was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, and the African Literary Award from the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. His third novel, The Seers, was published in the UK in June 2024, in the Netherlands and Belgium in September 2024, and is set to be released in the US, Canada, and Germany in 2025. He currently lives in Brussels, where he has launched a Creative Writing Academy for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, as well as the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile). In 2021, he was awarded Belgium’s Golden Afro-Art Prize for Literature, and in 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.