Aida edemariam biography images

As the coffee beans crackled in a pan over the fire, and the rich smell of freshly roasted coffee rose, Edemariam — in the manner of all clever children — sat silently to better eavesdrop. Her grandmother, Yetemegnu, was a natural raconteur, and Edemariam began taping their conversations when she was in her 20s.

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Yetemegnu lived until the age of 98, and her stories — those of a woman without political power — are often those lost to history. She talks of being married by the age of eight to a cleric 20 years her senior. Of giving birth to the first of her nine children at the age of Of surviving civil war. The book was also a chance for Edemariam, a writer and editor for the Guardian newspaper in London, to revisit her own childhood.

The daughter of two doctors — her mother is from Canada, and met her dad in Montreal while they were both medical students — Edemariam lived in Ethiopia until she was Edemariam came to the university because of her interest in the Romantics and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose papers reside at Victoria College. Near the end of the book, Edemariam describes taking her then-two-year-old daughter to Ethiopia.

Her daughter, too, watches coffee beans roasting in a pan over the fire and listens to the stories of her great-grandmother, then in her 90s. While Yetemegnu is frail and less talkative, her personality is still emotionally open. How verb tenses, word sounds — even abbreviations — shape perceptions, behaviour and trust in a digital world Read More.

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