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.
Biography 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.
In 2014 her then forthcoming memoir, The Wife's Tale: A Personal History"The Wife's Tale : A Personal History", Book Depository. – the story of Edemariam's Ethiopian grandmother, Yetemegnu"The Wife's Tale" at NetGallery. – was awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Award for a non-fiction work in progress."RSL Jerwood Awards for Non-Fiction 2014" , Royal Society of Literature, December 2014.
Informed by the author's 70 hours of interviews and conversations in Amharic with Yetemegnu,Carter, Sue (22 February 2018), "Author Aida Edemariam tells stories of Ethiopia through grandmother's eyes", Metro (Toronto). . The Wife's Tale received favourable critical on its publication in February 2018 by Fourth Estate/HarperCollins,Ammara Isa, "The Wife's Tale by Aida Edemariam" , IndieThinking at HarperCollins UK.The Wife's Tale, Fourth Estate, 2018, . with the reviewer for The Times finding it "enriching", 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." 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", 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."The Wife's Tale by Aida Edemariam — hard times: A vivid family portrait brings a century of Ethiopian history to life", Financial Times, 16 February 2018. 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." 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."Sawlani, Samira (16 July 2019), "The best books by African writers in 2019 so far…", African Arguments
Edemariam was awarded the Ondaatje Prize for The Wife's Tale in May 2019.
She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby."New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby", Reading to Transgress, 9 March 2020.
References
External links Aida Edemariam page at The Guardian.