Aida Edemariam

Aida Edemariam is an Ethiopian-Canadian journalist based in the UK, who has worked in New York, Toronto and London. She was formerly deputy review and books editor of the Canadian National Post, and is now a senior feature writer and editor at The Guardian in the UK. She lives in Oxford. Her memoir about her Ethiopian grandmother, The Wife's Tale: A Personal History, won the Ondaatje Prize in 2019.

Quotes

• What has stayed constant is a certain chippiness. Canadians feel both superior to and dependent on America, thus resenting it; they often get mistaken for Americans, and are afraid of being culturally subsumed. They feel the rest of the world ignores them, which is a pretty accurate perception. And they're always trying to define who they are (not American, not British, not boring) and not quite succeeding, being presented with the daunting challenge of a country that covers five-and-a-half time zones, speaks two languages and contains a province that periodically wishes to secede (and if it did so would set the four Atlantic provinces adrift).
  • "Us? Boring? Ha!", The Guardian (27 September 2002)

• In the churchyard she was set down while her male relations dug into the ground. A smell rose, of loam and of rain. Yetemegnu was brought to the front. Now she could see the priest who clambered into the shallow grave; see his censer swinging, one corner, another, another, overlaying earth with pious perfume. Hear the final prayers. Watch the bending backs lower their freight into the ground, head to the east, feet to the west, feel, like a blow to her own body, the first handful of soil land upon her mother.
  • Extract from The Wife's Tale: A Personal History (4th Estate (UK)/Harper (US)), as published in "Aida Edemariam's lyrical biography of Ethiopia wins Ondaatje Prize", The Telegraph (13 May 2019)

About Edemariam

• In the middle of war, Edemariam remembers soldiers so spooked that they fire rounds of machine-gun bullets into the heart of a tornado. Her grandmother shoves her and her cousin into the wardrobe. They sat crouched "among soft white dresses that smelled of incense and woodsmoke and limes"; her grandmother stood outside, sheltering them from all that passed. It is one startling, unforgettable story among an abundance of riches.
  • Nilanjana Roy "The Wife’s Tale by Aida Edemariam — hard times", Financial Times ()
  • From a review of the book.