About AALFIE
WHO AALFIE IS
Founded by Eritrean-Ethiopian-British author Sulaiman Addonia and launched in Brussels in 2019, the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile), AALFIE, emphasises its Pan-African roots and core feminist principles.
Although based in Brussels, AALFIE is rooted in ideas that reach far beyond geographical boundaries. It explores bold, borderless landscapes where imaginations, encounters and creative expression move freely. Its vision reflects and celebrates societies not as censored or sanitised, but as they exist, with all their diversity, troubles and beauty.
AALFIE brings together writers, poets, artists, musicians and thinkers across languages, borders and disciplines. We make space for work that is political, erotic, literary, musical, visual and unexpected, crossing borders rather than reinforcing them.
At AALFIE, languages meet, genres blur and new encounters become possible. The festival is particularly interested in voices, languages and forms that are often pushed to the margins, and in what happens when artists and audiences are given room to explore with curiosity, tenderness and risk.
In 2022, AALFIE brought together more than 60 artists, with performances in over 18 languages, and was named among the world’s 40 best literary festivals.
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.
FESTIVAL HISTORY
Since its first edition, the festival has grown exponentially; AALFIE welcomed more than 60 national and international artists, with performances in over 18 languages, and was selected as one of the 40 best festivals in the world.
TEAM
AALFIE VII — Team
Sulaiman Addonia is a writer and the founder of AALFIE, the Asmara–Addis Literary Festival (In Exile), and the Creative Writing Academy for Refugees & Asylum Seekers.
Angel Patricks Amegbe is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans writing, performance poetry, and visual storytelling. Her work dwells at the intersections of diasporic identity, mental health, faith, and belonging.
Community-making is central to her practice. She curates Taruwa, a gathering where diasporas connect through storytelling and creative expression, and founded Poetry and Tea, a safe space for wellbeing and collective creativity. Born in Nigeria, she now lives in Belgium with her family, continually making and remaking home between geographies, languages, and roles. She is the author of two novels, The Days of Silence and No Pink in a Rainbow (shortilsted for CANEX Prize for Publishing in Africa), as well as a poetry collection, SUNDANCE. Angel continues to explore art’s capacity to hold contradiction, spark dialogue, and create openings for healing.
Leon Verraest writes and performs in Dutch, English and West-Flemish. Debut novel forthcoming in 2027. Their debut novel, a coming-of-age story about how to find your voice when you come from the silence of a working-class background, will be published with Das Mag in 2027.” (Don’t make noise about das mag before 20 September approximately tho, we will announce around then)
Oucef is a juriste by education and a storyteller by necessity. Trained to dissect the rigid frameworks of law and institutional systems, he soon discovered that the most profound human truths often lie in the quiet spaces those laws cannot reach.
His journey, spanning from the shores of Tunisia to the heart of Brussels, is one of acute observation and existential navigation. Having witnessed the inner workings of political machinery and the isolating architecture of modern life, Oucef looks at the world through a lens that is deeply analytical, yet unmistakably human. He understands what it means to be caught between the heavy rules of society and the fragile weight of personal identity.
He is currently working on his first book. Through an introspective exploration of memory, displacement, and the absurdities of the modern world. For Oucef, storytelling is not merely a recounting of events, it is a vital act of reclaiming his own narrative in a world that often tries to write it for him.
Muhned Bnana (Muhannad Bennana): An Amazigh poet and linguist from Libya. Living in Belgium since 2018. Writes in Tamazight, Arabic, and English.
Julia Galaski is a Brussels-born writer and activist of Jewish-German heritage. Her debut novel, Le Passeport, was published in 2022. Her work explores our relationship with history and borders, migration and exile, language and memory, solidarity and liberation. She currently works on a second novel and a poetry collection, Retour à Al Mujaydil.
Delphine Somers is a visual artist living and working in Brussels since 2005. Her work treads the fine line between the archetypes that surface in folklore, myths, rituals, magic, and dreamworld, on the one hand, and the acutely contemporary, societal, and culturally specific, on the other.
Cornelio Agostinho is a pharmaceutical process engineer and long-standing member of Kizomba Romana, leading production and logistics for the Rome Kizomba Festival and dance weekends across Italy since 2014. Angolan/Italian, athletics lover, and devoted carbonara fan.