In May 2019 the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, worth £10,000 for a work that evokes the spirit of a place, went to Aida Edemariam for The Wife’s Tale, her lyrical biography rooted in Ethiopian family and history.
Edemariam’s book followed her grandmother’s life across Ethiopia’s twentieth-century upheavals, giving English-language readers a intimate path into places usually reached only through famine footage or palace politics.
Literary prizes do not settle wars, but they do decide which Ethiopian stories get shelf space abroad.
As culture archive, the Ondaatje win marks a diaspora writer bringing Ethiopian memory into a major British literary room without reducing the country to a single crisis headline.
Sources: The Telegraph