Professor Chigozie Obioma named one of the 100 most influential Africans by New African Magazine

Predicted as “truly the heir to Chinua Achebe” by the New York Times and “one of the most exciting voices of modern African literature” by the Financial Times, Obioma has already joined the heady ranks of Africa’s finest authors. Of Igbo descent and raised in a family of 12 children, he grew up with a fascination for Greek myths, British Classics and African works such as those of Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka. His first novel, The Fishermen, started as a seed in his mind in 2009 whilst studying for his BA in Northern Cyprus, having failed to secure a visa to a British university. It was not the experience he and his family had hoped it would be. It did however germinate the Booker Prize- nominated book, which he wrote whilst studying in the US, where he completed a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Michigan. The Fishermen was published in 2015, achieving several awards including the FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Award and the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was adapted into an award-winning stage play by Gbolahan Obisesan, performed in the UK and South Africa. His second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, was published in 2019 and he was again nominated for a Booker prize, one of only two novelists to be shortlisted for all their works. The book was a joint prize-winner of the Internationaler Literaturpreis 2020. His titles have been translated into 30 languages. Obioma was invited to be on the 2021 judges panel for the Booker Prize and has been named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Georgia, dividing his time between the US and his native Nigeria. His third novel, The Road to the Country, was published to wide acclaim in 2024.