Chigozie Obioma
Nigeria/ USA
Author photo: Nikki May
Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) were shortlisted for The Booker Prize. He is also the author of The Road to the Country (2024). His novels have been translated into more than 29 languages. They have won awards including the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and the LA Times Book Prize, and been nominated for many others. The Fishermen was adapted into an award-winning stage play by Gbolahan Obisesan that played in the UK and South Africa between 2018-2019. He was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015. Obioma is the Program Director and a mentor at Oxbelly Writers Retreat. He is the James E. Ryan Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and divides his time between the US and Nigeria.
What you can't miss:
Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, The Road to the Country is the epic story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt who must go to war to free himself. Kunle’s search for his brother becomes a journey of atonement that will see him conscripted into the breakaway Biafran army and forced to fight a war he hardly understands.
This novel is an odyssey of brotherhood, love and courage, intertwining myth and realism into a thrilling, inspired, and emotionally powerful story.
Reviews:
Spanning continents, traversing the earth and cosmic spaces, and told by a narrator who has lived for hundreds of years, the novel is a contemporary twist of Homer’s Odyssey. Written in the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about destiny and determination.
Reviews:
In 1990s Nigeria, four brothers from a quiet middle-class family take advantage of their father’s extended absence to skip school and go fishing at a forbidden river. There they encounter a vision-seeing madman whose prophecy of violence will follow the boys through their lives, and shake up their family in both devastatingly tragic and yet redemptive ways.
This is a powerful portrait of familial and brotherly bonds, and what happens when trust – the main chord that binds a family – is broken.
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