The London Library is delighted to welcome Gaar Adams and Sulaiman Addonia, two writers whose new works consider the complex intersections of queerness and migration.

Gaar Adams’s debut work of non-fiction, Guest Privileges, is a mix of memoir and reportage which explores what it means to be queer in the Gulf States and his own decade-long journey of dislocation. Asking why LGBTQ+ migrants might choose to live in a region where penalties for queer acts include torture and death, he riskily gathered interviews and stories from across the region. But as he began his own clandestine queer relationship, faultlines and deeper questions began to emerge, revealing his own disquieting assumptions about the motivations and identities of others.

Sulaiman Addonia’s third novel, The Seers, follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn, in the squares of Bloomsbury where its protagonist sleeps, and against the backdrop of the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the UK asylum system, the novel considers intergenerational histories and colonial trauma alongside the psychological and sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as land and nations are.

In conversation with novelist Isabelle Dupuy, these extraordinary writers discuss migration, dislocation and queerness, what it takes to balance opportunity and risk, subversion and assimilation, how to build a life and a community and what constitutes home.

Sulaiman Addonia appears as part of Flip Through Flanders, presented by Flanders Literature.

About the Speakers

Gaar Adams is the author of Guest Privileges: Queer Lives and Finding Home in the Middle East (Harvill Secker, 2024.) His reporting from the Middle East and South Asia has been featured in publications including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Rolling Stone, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, Slate and VICE. He was on the 2020-21 London Library Emerging Writers Programme and received his Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Glasgow. He currently teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Hull and lives in London.

Sulaiman Addonia FRSL is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist who came to London as an underage unaccompanied refugee. His other novels include The Consequences of Love and Silence is My Mother Tongue, which have been shortlisted for awards including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the African Literary Award from MoAD in San Francisco. His essays appear in Lit Hub, Granta, Freeman’s, The New York Times, De Standaard and Passa Porta. He lives in Brussels where he founded the Creative Writing Academy for Refugees & Asylum Seekers and the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival In Exile (AALFIE).

Isabelle Dupuy grew up in Haiti, has lived in America and came to the UK to work on a City trading floor before becoming an author. Her first novel Living the Dream was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Awards 2021. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, Bad Form Review, Black Ballad, the Bookseller, the RLF’s Writer’s Mosaic and more. She is a trustee of The London Library.

About The International Library:

The International Library is a series launched in collaboration with the American Library in Paris, the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn and The London Library, which offers conversations across time, place, and language. The International Library celebrates the live diffusion of in-person conversations in the hope of connecting new audiences across land and sea for a collective, intercultural experience.