Prototype signs 'urgent and empowering' novel from Addonia

Prototype has signed The Seers, a novel from Sulaiman Addonia about the weeks first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. 

Founder and publisher Jess Chandler acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Jessica Craig at Craig Literary. Uitgeverij Jurgen Maas acquired Dutch rights and north American rights and translation rights will be on submission during the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023. Prototype will publish the novel in June 2024.

The Seers is written in a "gripping" continuous paragraph and follows Hannah, who arrives in London with her mother’s diary "containing a disturbing sexual story taking place in Keren, Eritrea". The publisher added: "The Seers moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories, colonial trauma, and the realities of the UK asylum system and its impact on young refugees." 

Addonia is a British-Eritrean-Ethiopian novelist who spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan following the Om Hajar massacre in 1976 and arrived in London as an underage, unaccompanied refugee not knowing English. He graduated with an MA in Development Studies from SOAS and has written three novels. Addonia commented: "The Seers is an ode to years spent with the work of writers who defied the norms, and I can’t wait to share it with readers. It’s a book that I hadn’t planned and instead came to me one afternoon as I stood in front of Flagey Ponds, Brussels, during the spring 2020 lockdown. I wrote it all on my iPhone and in about three weeks. It was like a volcano erupting with words, ideas and feelings that I had no control over." 

Chandler added: "The Seers is a brave, urgent and empowering novel, which explores the psychological and erotic lives of its characters as their identities are shaped, but refused to be suppressed, by the bureaucratic processes of the UK asylum system. It is a remarkable, necessary, and timely novel, which I feel immensely privileged to be publishing."