THE WD INTERVIEW Chigozie Obioma
Short-listed for The Booker Prize, Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities is widely considered one of the finest novels currently in print. From the very beginning of the narrative, it’s clear this is fiction brought to life by a master of the genre. One early moment that attests to this is when the narrator describes a goose trailing its dead mother, which is in the hands of the main character Nonso’s father:
His father did not notice the gosling scampering along after him, making a shrilling sound which, many years later, my host would realize was the sound of a weeping bird.
One hallmark of great literature is when language possesses meaning on different, sometimes competing levels. In this case, the goose is not only a metaphor for Nonso, but could also be said to reflect the human condition through our frequent indifference to suffering.
Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His debut novel, The Fishermen, won the inaugural FT/ OppenheimerFunds Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Award for Debut Author, and the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (Los Angeles Times Book Prizes); and was a finalist for The Booker Prize 2015, as well as for several other literary prizes in the U.S. and U.K. Obioma was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015. His work has been translated into more than 25 languages and adapted for the stage. He is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
An Orchestra of Minorities was published in January 2019.
What was your childhood like? Did you grow up around books or was literature
