Ciao Asmara: A Classic Account of Contemporary Africa - Softcover

Asmara is the capital of Eritrea. It is a surreally Italian city at the center of an ex–Italian colony that has, for more than ten years, been at war with its neighbor Ethiopia, which claims sovereignty over Eritrea. Amidst the broken palaces of the late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, nomadic desert encampments, and war–devastated towns, Justin Hill found a people remarkably resistant to everything fate has thrown at them. This book, a tribute to their resilience, will stand beside Philip Gouravitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families as a classic account of contemporary Africa.

Justin Hill was born in the Bahamas, and grew up in York, attending St Peter's School. He studied Old England and Medieval Literature at Durham University, and spent most of his twenties on postings with Voluntary Service Overseas in rural China and East Africa.
He has written poetry, non-fiction and fiction, which spans eras as distant from one another as Anglo Saxon England, in Shieldwall, to Tang Dynasty, China, in Passing Under Heaven. His work has won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award, as well as being selected as a Sunday Times Book of the Year (Shieldwall) and a Washington Post Books of the Year (The Drink and Dream Teahouse).
In 2014 he was selected to write the sequel to the Oscar winning film, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.
He lives near York.