African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don’t care anymore. I’m more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves – how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been...

When I was growing up in Nigeria – and I shouldn’t say Nigeria, because that’s too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I’m from – there were always rites of...

That women are mysterious and unknowable is something every young man grows up believing. Men, on the other hand, never think of themselves as mysterious or confusing, and we are often at a loss as...

My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is...

There is no living African writer who has not had to, or will not have to, contend with Achebe’s work. We are either resisting him – stylistically, politically, or culturally – or we are writing...

If I don’t get at least one e-mail every ten minutes, I feel unloved. Even junk mail makes me feel seen. Sad, I know. Sigh.

I love essays, but they’re not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

What I’ve come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South...

In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.

My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the ’50s.

Every successful artist comes from a family – parents or siblings or both – who, although equally gifted, chose not to pursue the treacherous and difficult path of the artist.

I truly believe that writing is a continuum – so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the...

I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older...

It takes me forever to actually finish something like a ten-page essay. But, when I do, I usually love what they are. It’s a complicated relationship.

Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction. Who doesn’t need that last minute research before writing?

My grand uncle was a traditional priest, and he would always say to me as a kid, ‘We stand in our own light,’ which essentially for him meant we were entirely responsible for a lot...

Sometimes I feel very alone. I am a bit of a nomad. Many people in sort of emerging countries, emerging economies, find themselves displaced. So there is that sense, and so I’m part of a...

We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that’s not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not – I mean, things...

I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I’m not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don’t bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I’m not a book-club style reader. I’m...

The Igbo used to say that they built their own gods. They would come together as a community, and they would express a wish. And their wish would then be brought to a priest, who...

I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don’t know that there’s anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little...

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is.

I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school, and the federal government didn’t want us taught...

My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never...

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the ’50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English.

I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.