The Pontas Agency is proud to welcome Ennatu Domingo and her narrative non-fiction debut, Burnt Eucalyptus Wood: A Story of Origins and Identities, which will be published in March 2022 by Editorial Navona in Catalan (original language) and translated into Spanish. All other rights are available, and a full English translation is also available.
On February 23rd, 2022 a nice event took place in Barcelona where Ernest Folch presented the new relaunched publisher Editorial Navona, now under his direction, with a new design and editorial team and willing to publish 60 titles per year (fiction and non-fiction, both in Catalan and Spanish). In the photos above, Ennatu Domingo read some excerpts of the first chapter of her Burnt Eucalyptus Wood in front of an audience of booksellers and journalists.
Burnt Eucalyptus Wood is a book to be read in a heartbeat; it is a necessary and essential account to understand today’s world. It’s a brave and astonishing testimony that makes you think about origins, multiple identities, inequalities, feminism, racism and the importance of language in order to know who we are and we can’t wait for it to reach readers far and wide. It dives into the unforgettable experiences of a seven-year-old girl in the early 2000s in rural Ethiopia, before being adopted by a Catalan family. As an adult, she still wonders about the reasons for the living conditions of the rural Ethiopian population—especially the women’s—, of which she was part herself as a child; while she analyses how to live with more than one identity and what it means to lose and relearn one’s mother tongue.
The richness of the author’s testimony can help to deconstruct the paternalistic and Eurocentric views that still prevail everywhere, bringing the readers closer to the author’s nomadism and making them travel through the different interspersed levels of narration.
Ennatu Domingo was born in Ethiopia in 1996. She holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Kent in Canterbury (England) and an MA in International Conflict and Security from the University of Kent in Brussels (Belgium). She interned at the International Crisis Group (ICG), at their offices in Nairobi (Kenya); she was awarded a Schuman traineeship to work at the Department of Foreign Affairs at the European Parliament in Brussels, in the field of relations between the European Union and countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific; and she currently works as a research assistant for the think tank European Center for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), at their headquarters in Maastricht (The Netherlands). Burnt Eucalyptus Wood is her first book.
For more information, please contact Anna Soler-Pont (anna@pontas-agency.com)