Sahle Sellassie Berhane Mariam (Amharic: ሣህለ ሥላሴ ብርሃነ ማርያም; born 1936) is an Ethiopian novelist and translator.
Sahle Sellassie attended a Catholic mission school in Endibir before moving to Addis Ababa to complete his secondary education.
Soon we, Ethiopian students, in Aix-en-Provence, Grenoble, Paris and other French cities began to communicate with letters and phone to express our solidarity to the coup.
[6][7][10][8] Sahle Sellassie's first Amharic novel, ወጣት ይፍረደው, or Let Youth Judge It, deals with love and marriage.
Ayne-regrb is unable to face Ashe and to avoid shaming her family she consents to marrying an elderly man.
[12] The title refers to a traditional method of criminal investigation and prosecution whereby the injured party calls a community meeting to launch an inquiry.
[13] The novel begins with the burning of Namaga's hut and the subsequent search for the culprit through several meetings of the afersata.
[14][15] The novel has been interpreted as an effort to portray communal and self-sufficient rural life in contrast to faraway towns, although some reviewers consider it as lacking artistry.
I went to Gondor city and stayed there several days visiting historical spots, looking for vestiges of the emperor, and inquiring people about him.
[18] Warrior King is an historical novel based on the early life of Emperor Tewodros, from his origins as a commoner to his ascension to the throne following the defeat of Ras Ali.
[19][20] The events take place during the Zemene Mesafint, a period in Ethiopian history between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries when the country had no effective central authority.
An English play also appeared in 1965 by Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin[21] The novel was received poorly, as it was seen to rely too heavily on historical documentation and a lack of dialogue.
[19][22] Sahle Sellassie submitted the manuscript that had been rejected by Heinemann to Longman for inclusion in their Drumbeat series.
He begins work as an auditor at a local company with the aim of addressing corruption in government office.
Bezuneh turns down the bride, but then learns that Mr Richardson and his manager, His Excellency Ato Kebret, are friends.
The conflict of political ideologies and the threat of corruption are the clear themes of the novel [24][25] Following the historical fiction of Warrior King, Sahle Sellassie then turned his attention to the Italian occupation of Ethiopia with ባሻ ቅጣው, or "Punish Him".
Sahle Sellassie has translated five novels into Amharic, including Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, and Pearl S. Buck's The Mother.
[8] The author himself made it clear in the early 1980s that he intended to only write in English, translating some of his novels into Amharic if needed.
The debate began with the publication of the first two instalments of Asfaw Damte's "Modern Amharic Literature" series, which was intended to run to four essays.
He views the small number of works in English by Ethiopia writers as insignificant, with the exception of those by Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, Daniachew Worku and Sahle Sellassie.
[27] These exchanges can be seen to form part of a much wider debate about language use, which included Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and others.