Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian novelist.

He has written three novels: The Fishermen (2015), An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), and The Road to the Country (2024). The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Road to the Country was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize for fiction and the Dublin Literary Award for fiction. The Economist and the Boston Globe named it best book of the year.

Chigozie has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Internationale Literaturpreis, the FT/Oppenheimer Prize for Fiction, and an NAACP Image Award. In 2015, Foreign Policy named him one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers, and he was on the New African magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential Africans in 2015 and 2024.

He has written for The Guardian, The Financial Times, Granta, The New York Times and The Paris Review.

Chigozie is currently the Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, and the programme director of the Oxbelly Fiction Writers retreat.

Talking About Books interviewed Chigozie on his book about the Biafra War and integrating Nigerian folklore into his fiction.

TAB: The Road to the Country is centred around the Biafra War in Nigeria. Why was it important for you to tell this story?

CO: Thank you again for conducting this interview. I have always known that I would write about this war from a long time ago, perhaps from when I was only a boy. It just really was this event that was seared into my consciousness mostly by an encounter in 1993. I was only six years old when Nigeria erupted that year, due to the annulment of the presidential elections won by chief MKO Abiola. The immediate result was a riot and a group of people trying to protest the action by the Nigerian junta. My family, as most Igbo families, felt safer in the East so we set out for the East. Once we got to the village, my first time there, I was faced with the sad specter of many people with physical deformities—a man without limbs who was on a wheelchair; another woman with just one arm; and a young woman with half her face eaten up what I would later discover was cancrum oris, a rare disease spurred by the war. Naturally, I became deeply curious about the war and began reading whatever I could find about it, and knew over the years that I wanted to write a novel about it at some point.

So, over the years, I read so much and heard so much from people who had experienced the war in one form or the other. Of course, there have been documentaries, memoirs, historical accounts, etc. I also read books about other wars to get a sense of what it meant to be a frontline soldier in a war. I even ventured to ask an active Nigerian soldier fighting the Boko Haram insurgents in the north of Nigeria what it felt like for which I was in danger—in this piece I wrote for the Financial Times.

TAB: The Road to the Country is narrated by a Seer, who can see the future of Kunle, who has not yet been born. Why did you choose to frame the story in this way?

CO: Igbala Oludamisi, the seer, is probably one of the hardest characters I have ever created, but one of the most delightful too. He is the canvas through which I am able to expand the novel beyond the simple, linear-structured novel. He is a prophet, and I feel that the prophetic is a realm that is very much familiar to me as someone who grew up in the cultures—the Igbo, Yoruba, and Christian—I grew up in, all of which believe and effectively promote the prophetic. I wanted to tell this story in a way that allowed me to give expression to the axiom that the true story of a war can only truthfully be told by both the living and the dead. As such, I needed the metaphysical plain to be one of the stages of the novel’s drama. I also wanted to continue in the tradition of exploring the mystical sense of life and being in fiction, which I had done in my previous two novels: The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities. As such, the seer is able to become the central consciousness of the novel, able to perceive the past, present, and the future all at the same time. This allows me, too, to be able to establish the history of the war, the sad reality that such a war could have been prevented through prudence and dialogue, had the people heeded the certain warning of the slowly fracturing parts of the constituent states of the Nigerian federation at the time.

TAB: The experiences in the book feel very real: the actual fighting and the way it affects soldiers. How were you able to recreate this so well?

CO: I often write fiction that is mostly rooted in the imagination, with very minimal research and scoping from known/documented resources. But with this novel being based on real events and therefore a work of historical fiction, I had to try to recreate a time in history that has not received as much attention in fiction as I feel it should. And also, I wanted this to be a novel that memorializes because these events actually happened to real people. I know it’s a cliché to say that people who have experienced the horrors of war, especially combatants, do not like to speak about it, but Biafra is especially unique in that this was a war of unequal forces to the nth degree. As I depict in the novel, much of the time the Biafrans were fighting without weapons. We are talking of a company of 70 soldiers with only 40 rifles and very limited ammunition going against a federal unit equipped with tanks and heavy weapons and aerial support. So, it mattered to me to tell this story with as much sense of verisimilitude as possible.

TAB: It is guilt that leads Kunle into war—the guilt of being responsible for his brother’s disability. There is a link with your first book, which also is about the relationships between siblings and how they can sometimes fall apart. What brings you back to that theme?

CO: Well, the truth is that I am interested in relationships, which for me is the energy for storytelling. How do people form connections, break those connections, and sometimes attempt to put those connections back together again. For me, this is what I am interested in investigating in stories, and it so happens that familial relationships have been part of that (The Fishermen). I have also explored varied relationships, including romantic relationships between a man and a woman and a mystical relationship between a man and his spirit in my second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities. In The Road to the Country, I investigate the relationship between Kunle and his comrades, and a romantic relationship between him and his love interest, Agnes. So, while brotherhood features in many of these novels, they have not been the only focus.

TAB: An Orchestra of Minorities is very different from The Fishermen. It is narrated by the chi (spirit guardian) of the protagonist Chinonso and is framed as a defence by the chi of Chinonso’s actions. What led you to write this book and choose the chi to narrate it?

CO: I have always thought that the novel, if it must survive and endure, has to be challenged every time we engage it. That is my artistic goal. I hope to renew and even reform the novel as an artistic form every time I engage with it. As such, when the story of this novel came to me, I thought, how best to tell this story in a way that will bring something new, even original, to it. I found the concept of the chi, which in the Igbo cosmology, is the index of divinity in every human being. The guardian spirit allowed me to then be able to narrate Chinonso’s story from a multi-dimensional perspective, including a mystical and also metaphysical one. As such, the novel tells Chinonso’s story as well as the chi—a multiple protagonist situation that is echoed again in The Road to the Country. But even more, the chi is able to tell the story of an entire civilization because it has lived for some 700 years, returning again and again, and as such, has become a chronicler of the histories and philosophies of the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria.

TAB: You draw on Nigerian folklore and cosmology in your writing. Could you tell us about how you use them, and why it is important to keep these myths and beliefs alive?

CO: You see, I have always believed that there is a need for a novel to be triangular in its orientation—vis á vis that it should 1) Tell a personal story; 2) Explore a grounding philosophy or idea, or theme; 3) Have a unique structure or concept as the governing principle of composition. A hidden fourth, which can however be subsumed within the kernel of the second point is that it should seek to educate the reader or illuminate something that may be obscure or unclear. This is what I have always tried to do in all three novels and short stories. What is funny is that An Orchestra of Minorities is now used by many who are interested in the study of Igbo cosmology and traditions as the book of study. This is, I suppose, very gratifying for me.

TAB: When did you start writing? Is it something you have always done?

CO: I believe so, mostly because this desire began very early in my life. When I was about eight or nine, I was always down with malaria or something and frequently spent several days in the hospital. During those days, my dad would sit by my bedside and tell me stories. Then one day, healthy and at home, I asked him to tell me a story, and he said, “Go and read it yourself.” He gave me a book and when I went and read it, I discovered that one of the most fascinating stories he’d ever told me was in the book! That book was Amos Tutuola’s mythic odyssey, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, which also happens to be the first black African novel in the English language. That was a pivotal moment. Prior to that I had always seen my dad as this great man who had this vast reserve of stories, but then I saw I could actually get this thing from books, and I started reading voraciously. Then I began to replicate the stories in written form, so that was the point where I moved from a storyteller to a writer.

TAB: Thank you for the interview and for sharing the ideas behind your books.

Read my reviews of The Road to the Country and The Fishermen, and Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard.