Chigozie Obioma talks to Ellah P Wakatama

Award-winning Nigerian novelist Chigozie Obioma talks about his new work, The Road to the Country, the story of a man crossing a war zone during one of the most devastating civil wars of the 20th century.

The novel is set in Nigeria in the late 1960s. Kunle sets out to find his younger brother as the country explodes into civil war. The shy and bookish student has to go to war to free himself. He is conscripted into the breakaway Biafran army and forced to fight a war he barely understands. Meanwhile, a local seer prophesies that Kunle is an Abami Eda, one who will die and return to life. The Road to the Country blends myth and realism to tell a story of brotherhood, love and courage.

‘Chigozie Obioma is that rare thing: an original. His world is a mix of the real and the folkloric, and his writing sounds like no one else’s.’ Wall Street Journal

Obioma’s first two novels, The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities, were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Fishermen won a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was translated into 26 languages. The Fishermen was adapted into an award-winning stage play that played in the UK and South Africa between 2018 and 2019. He was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015. He is the James E. Ryan Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Here he talks to Ellah P Wakatama, editor at large at Canongate Books and chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Wakatama serves on the board of the Royal Literary Fund and is former deputy editor of Granta magazine, former editor at large for Granta books and has also worked as senior editor at Jonathan Cape and assistant editor at Penguin.