November 2020
Arada Books and the Italian Cultural Institute of Addis Ababa are delighted to announce the release of the new Amharic-Italian dictionary, by Gianfrancesco Lusini, Professor of Ge’ez and Amharic at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. The work of Professor Lusini is the first up to date dictionary of this sort in over 100 years. A major improvement of the interaction between these two languages, it is meant to be a solid bridge thrown between two cultures. The book complements the Italian-Amharic dictionary published in 2014 and is a comprehensive and authoritative reference tool for beginners, intermediate, and advanced language learners. This second volume – which features more than 20,000 words and expressions – relies on clear examples to aid the understanding of key concepts, sentence structures and idioms, while facilitating the pronunciation of the words.
The Amharic-Italian dictionary has been supported by the “Vivere All’Italiana” cultural program of the Italian Foreign Ministry with the contribution by Varnero Construction.
The book will be available from the 1st of December 2020 at the Italian Cultural Institute of Addis Ababa and in the city’s bookshops.  

February 2017
It is a very sad news that Professor Richard Pankhurst passed away on 16 February. We had the honour and pleasure to collaborate with him from the very beginning of Arada Books, which is proud to include him among its authors. Professor Pankhurst has kindly encouraged and supported Arada Books from its establishment and we all have greatly benefitted from his advices. His support was particularly important in the difficult phases of the translation and publishing of Angelo del Boca’s The Negus, of which Professor Pankhurst wrote the introduction. For the prominent role he played in the Ethiopian culture and against the legacies of colonialism, his loss will leave a huge void for all of us. 

November 2016
Arada Books has started to work on the new edition of Old Tracks – A Historical Guide to Addis, which was first published in 2004. The new edition will thoroughly update and improve the content, with new colour photos, new maps, and GPS coordinates of all the historical public and private buildings dealt with in the book.  The new “A Historical Guide to Addis Ababa” will meet the many requests Arada Books has received in the past years to have the book back to the shelves after the large favour it encountered among national and international travellers interested in discovering the history of the Ethiopian capital, those who are passionate about cultural heritage and architecture.  

September 2016
The new "A Comprehensive Guide to Harar and Surroundings" has been published. It is the sixth guide that Arada Books has published, to date, on Ethiopia, following those on Tigray, Gondar, Lalibela, Aksum, and Addis Ababa. See the Travel Guides section for more information about the newly published book and the Arada Books travel guide series.

March 2016
The new "A Comprehensive Guide to the Rock Hewn Churches of Tigray" is on the shelves! The guide, written by Milena Batistoni after years of research and several surveys, has 169 pages, 78 colour photos, and is enriched by 27 church plans. The guide deals with one of the most magnificent and famous Ethiopian cultural heritage, almost unknown abroad before the 1960s.

Arada Books Publishing Plc
P.O. Box 28668 code 1000
Addis Ababa - Ethiopia
info@aradabooks.com

Arada books is a small and independent publishing house, established in Addis Ababa in 2004. It was created - and is managed – by people inspired and fascinated by the culture of Ethiopia, the country where they live and work. Arada Books intends to contribute to the development of the Ethiopian historical and cultural heritage through the enhancement and distribution of intellectual property. It also wants to facilitate the access to such a culture and to improve the latter’s communication with the rest of the world. For these reasons, Arada Books has chosen English as working language, although it intends to release bilingual editions (Amharic and English) in order to make the books accessible to a larger part of the Ethiopian population. Arada Books specializes in the publication and distribution of books on Ethiopian culture.