Aida Edemariam | |
---|---|
Nationality | Ethiopian, Canadian |
Alma mater | Oxford University; University of Toronto |
Occupation | Journalist |
Employer | The Guardian |
Notable work | The Wife's Tale (2018) |
Father | Edemariam Tsega |
Awards | Jerwood Award; Ondaatje Prize |
Aida Edemariam is an Ethiopian-Canadian journalist based in the UK, who has worked in New York, Toronto and London. [1] She was formerly deputy review and books editor of the Canadian National Post , [2] and is now a senior feature writer and editor at The Guardian in the UK. She lives in Oxford. [1] Her memoir about her Ethiopian grandmother, The Wife's Tale: A Personal History, won the Ondaatje Prize in 2019. [3] [4]
Edemariam was born to an Ethiopian father and a Canadian mother. She grew up in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. She studied English literature at Oxford University and the University of Toronto. [5]
In 2014 her then forthcoming memoir, The Wife's Tale: A Personal History [6] – the story of Edemariam's Ethiopian grandmother, Yetemegnu [7] – was awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Award for a non-fiction work in progress. [8] [1]
Informed by the author's 70 hours of interviews and conversations in Amharic with Yetemegnu, [9] The Wife's Tale received favourable critical on its publication in February 2018 by Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, [10] [11] with the reviewer for The Times finding it "enriching", [12] and Lucy Hughes-Hallett writing in the New Statesman : "To read The Wife's Tale is not just to hear about times past and (for a western reader) far away, but to be transported into them." [13] Nadifa Mohamed's review in The Guardian praised the book as "a loving portrait of a grandmother, undiminished by the distances between the author and her subject", [14] and Nilanjana Roy in The Financial Times described it as an "outstanding and unusual memoir" in which Edemariam traces a century of Ethiopian history through the life of her nonagenarian grandmother. [15] In The Observer , Arifa Akbar noted: "What brings this narrative flaring to life, though, is not the rigour of its research but its imagination and novelistic tone; Edemariam's prose climbs inside Yetemegnu's memories to inhabit them and bring her solidly, vividly, to life." [16] Selecting The Wife's Tale as one of "the best books by African writers in 2019", Samira Sawlani on African Arguments concluded: "Aida Edemariam has gifted the world a priceless insight into history through her grandmother's eyes." [17]
Edemariam was awarded the Ondaatje Prize for The Wife's Tale in May 2019. [18] [19]
She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa , edited by Margaret Busby. [20]