Hannah Pool: Discovering her unknown family

Hannah Pool was recently featured on African Voices. She was born in Eritrea in 1974 and was adopted at the age of six months by an American mother and a  British father, David Pool, a professor at Khartoum University in nearby Sudan and his wife Marya, who later died when she just 4 years old. David Pool arranged for Hannah to stay with friends in Norway until she was 7 years old. When he eventually returned to England he took her back. By the time she returned to England she was fluent in Norwegian and struggled a little to assimilate. She was raised in Manchester, England, with the belief that both her parents had died shortly after her birth.

She currently lives in England and works as a columnist for The Guardian. While in college she received a letter with a photograph from her brother informing her that her father was alive and she had a sister and several brothers who lived in Eritrea. She put the letter away for ten years before making the decision to meet with her birth family. She then embarked on a journey which took her back to her origins and which she recounts in her book titled My Fathers’ Daughter: A story of Family and Belonging. Hannah Pool is best known for her column in The Guardian, “The New Black”.

Hannah Pool has published a book “My Fathers Daughter”. In her own words Hannah Pool describes her life at a TEDx Event. She describes how her mother died shortly after giving birth to her and how her father put her in the orphanage from where she was adopted. Ten years after receiving the letter she eventually decided to go to Eritrea to find her family.