Booker Prize nominee Chigozie Obioma on being an African writer today • FRANCE 24 English

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:02][music] [music] >> Hello and welcome at Arts 24. We're here at the Moroccan African Book Festival, the Flam, a key gathering for writers, thinkers, and novelists from across Africa and its diasporas. I'm here joined by a major voice from the continent, the Nigerian novelist Chigozie Obioma, whose acclaimed works, The Fisherman and An Orchestra of Minorities, have both been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Hello and welcome on France 24. Thank you.

[00:00:58]Such a pleasure to be here. Why is it important for you as an African writer to be in Africa and to encounter and meet with fellow African writers and thinkers?

[00:01:12]You know, I have been very lucky. I've gotten a lot of press and recognition in in, you know, a number of places. And but last year, for example, I went back to Nigeria and did an actual book tour.

[00:01:28]And it gave me the most joy. The you know, my people were reading me the way that they are. And so, um I think that recognition, you know, in the US or UK is nice or Germany. But to be read and to meet readers and all other writers in Africa is a special joy, especially because I'm one of those writers who have always thought like what am I missing, you know, from the literatures of of the not Africans or even of Congo. I mean, cuz I can't read French. Hearing about Flam and the attempt to bridge this divide is extraordinary. I was invited 2 years ago, but it didn't work out. So, I was excited when I was asked to come again this year.

[00:02:18]>> Yeah. The theme of this festival is imagining other possibilities.

[00:02:23]What does this mean to you? How it inspires you?

[00:02:27]I mean >> Especially in the world that we're living in now. I'm always in my work and I I suppose in the work of most writers thinking about how can we dig up even things that people are not looking at.

[00:02:39]Mhm.

[00:02:40]This is the essential work of the writer. I feel that, you know, my theory of composition, for example, is not to write about the world um as it ought to be, but as it is. What I'm looking at is not what everyone else is seeing.

[00:02:56]So, I'm looking at the things that seem hidden. So, that when I prop them up, they they become almost new. For example, I write about siblinghood and sibling rivalry.

[00:03:08]Everybody, you know, except you're an only child, has experienced that. But at the same time, you prop up certain dimensions of it that even someone with 10 siblings would be like, "Man, I didn't think that this was what sibling rivalry means."

[00:03:25]>> So, the obvious and confronting the obvious is important.

[00:03:28]>> Yes.

[00:03:29]Um you're from Nigeria and you live and teach in the United States.

[00:03:33]Many African writers today are published and mainly read outside of the continent. How do you view this imbalance and what does it mean to you for the way African stories are written and received?

[00:03:51]>> There are divergencies in the way that we're perceived. You know, I came to an understanding in 2017 when my work was translated into I was doing a European tour of about six countries and I realized that, you know, in Southern Europe they're going to read my work from the lens of someone who is a speaker or representative of Nigeria, not as a fiction writer. The fiction writer is secondary. In the UK, they will read me more as a writer. In in the France or Germany, again, they're looking at the philosophical What are the philosophical intentions here? In America, what are you doing about race? In Africa, you know, in Nigeria, for example, how are you representing our stories to the world? So, these are divergencies of how people look at you.

[00:04:44]So, which is to say that But that's so interesting.

[00:04:48]The perception is different from one continent to another, from one country to another.

[00:04:53]Does it affect you as a writer like from that 20 to like 2017 recognition of this readership? Do you have it in mind whenever you write a new novel or you don't think about it?

[00:05:07]>> There's always that pressure, okay, how am I going to be received because I'm coming from, you know, a continent that is just marginalized. It's just, you know, there's nothing I can do about it.

[00:05:17]Now, recognizing that those divergencies, what it does for me is to just make whatever I'm writing as genuinely felt as possible. So, that what I write, if I write about a boy in Akure, someone in in Afghanistan can see themselves in that boy because of just how embodied. So, instead of observing, I embody character. Really. So, it's a craft switch for me. You often explore deeply rooted cultural and spiritual worlds in your work. Do you ever feel a tension between writing for a global audience and staying grounded in local realities, especially that you live abroad now? You know, I like to say that if I'm if I'm to draw the way I write, if I'm to draw a if I'm to write about this moment, what I tend to do is I look I see the obvious things, you know, your your nice earrings, the painting and and and those obvious things. But if I decide, you know, I'm going to suspend that writing till later tonight or tomorrow, what happens is that my mind fictionalizes things. So, hindsight cannot imagine that thing in in its completeness. So, imagination dilutes the remembering. So, what you find is the non-obvious things, you know, the small red in the white flower. And these are the details that make fiction very interesting, that creates this sense of verisimilitude. You read a description of a room and you feel like this is it's so vivid. So, that's why So, if you extrapolate that into a larger context, then if I'm in Nigeria and living in Nigeria, I would write only the obvious things.

[00:07:12]But if I'm not there, I can envision it even better. In my view, it's always been like that. So, your source of imagination is the memories or your travels also to to Nigeria to raise new memories and write about them. Yes, so it has to be delayed. If I were living Nigeria, feel like my writing would become more documentary rather than imaginative. Really, is the is the point. So, I go there, I see things, they die, and new things are bettered from the memory that seems to have died.

[00:07:43]What can you tell us about the Nigerian literature?

[00:07:47]Who are the Nigerian writers [laughter] that you you do love read? So, there's a flowering, of course, of in the past two decades.

[00:07:57]Many of them have become good friends of mine. Of course, I you know, I celebrate the older writers, but I I recommend Ayobami Adebayo, for example, Chika Unigwe. Of course, Chimamanda as well. Um And who else? These are all women.

[00:08:17]Okwiri Oduor.

[00:08:19]That's a male. Yeah, so these are Teju Cole. So, these are writers that I, you know, I admire their work a lot. And from the African continent, are there like African writers or novelists that have always not only maybe inspired you, but like shaped your writings or the path that you took?

[00:08:41]Also, yes.

[00:08:42]In in terms of actual shaping of my imagination, they are very actually very varied. I I remember reading Season of Migration to the North um 20 years ago and it had an impression on me, Tayeb Salih. From Sudan.

[00:09:00]Yes, Alan Paton from South Africa. Of course, Ngugi wa Thiong'o. So, there's a lot of them.

[00:09:08]Even among contemporaries, I like Scholastique Mukasonga, who is a good friend as well, a lot.

[00:09:15]I think that she would win the Nobel Prize someday. So, these are, you know, very interesting writers that I I find very fascinating. In your famous book The Fisherman, which was translated in to many languages, the sense of faith and prophecy is very strong. Do you still believe more in destiny or choice?

[00:09:35]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, I think it's it's quite diluted in my belief. I don't think that there is anybody who that we exist in a vacuum.

[00:09:45]You know, I'll give you a very quick anecdote. You know, years ago, somebody told me of something. He said that there was a woman who, one day, you know, she was putting on a brand. She just had the thought in her mind that she might have breast cancer.

[00:10:01]It just came out of nowhere. Long story short, she goes to the hospital, the doctor says to her, uh well, nothing like that. Uh do you have that in your family? She says, "No."

[00:10:14]Then go and forget it. She forgets it for like a month or two, it comes back again. This time she becomes obsessed.

[00:10:22]She ask everybody, "Do you know the symptom of this?"

[00:10:25]You know, 6 months later, she has it.

[00:10:28]Wow. So that's a a situation in which it seems to me that she caused that thing into being, you know? So So I feel like there are dimensions >> be a choice, basically.

[00:10:40]>> Yes, even when you are not making the choice consciously. So that's the other side of life that sometimes appears myth in my work.

[00:10:49]Chigozie Obioma, thank you, and thank you also so much for being with us. Stay tuned on France 24.