AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES


FIFTY WORDS

Baye Teshager Asmamaw is an Ethiopian writer and participant in the Amhara
resistance. Across Ethiopia, Italy, and the United States, he wrote, organised,
and broadcast for a movement he believed defended his people's life and dignity.
Half a Knife is his reckoning with its achievements, its costs, and the choices
facing the coming generation.


ONE HUNDRED WORDS

Baye Teshager Asmamaw is an Ethiopian writer and participant in the Amhara
resistance. Across Ethiopia, Italy, and the United States, he wrote, organised,
and broadcast for a movement he believed defended his people's life and dignity.
He co-founded multiple media organisations and published essays and commentary
across print, digital, social, and mainstream media. He now reckons with the
resistance's achievements and costs, and with the strategic choices facing the
coming generation.


TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY WORDS

Baye Teshager Asmamaw was born in Debark, in North Gondar, and raised there by
his grandmother, Emahoy Chaklit Wassie, in deep poverty. He finished school at
the top of his class, took an engineering degree at Bahir Dar University and a
master's in Addis Ababa, and was posted first to Assosa University and then to
Addis Ababa Science and Technology University, lecturing with a faculty deanship
on top of it. He left Ethiopia at the end of August 2014 for a second master's
at the University of Trento, returned for the last time in the summer of 2015,
and reached the United States in January 2017.

His political writing began under his own name: a post from Trento in January
2015, written four months before that year's election, in which he broke with
the design of the Ethiopian state itself. In 2016 a colleague gave him the pen
name Neakutoleab — with the charge "let it be proclaimed" folded inside it — and he carried it for seven years,
through the Gondar uprising, the diaspora campaign for United States House
Resolution 128, the building of ASRAT Media, essays in the magazine Fitih, and a
Facebook following that passed twenty thousand. In June 2023 he laid the pen
name down and stopped writing publicly.

Half a Knife is his reckoning with those years, built from memory and a dated
archive of 3,471 of his own posts, 2009 to 2025, alongside essays, letters, and
broadcasts kept across Ethiopia, Italy, and the United States. Where memory and
the record disagreed, the record governed. He lives in Winchester, Virginia.
