Blog Post

In February, Communique — a publication that every African creative should be reading — published an incisive breakdown of our work at Open Country Mag, with a title four years overdue: “Open Country Mag makes a case for African longform writing.” The feature, by Oritsejolomi Otomewo, is so thoughtfully written, it makes me happy. (As […]

I just did an interview with The Republic, my first in three years. It is a long one, but the questions by the journal’s associate editor Peace Onafuye are good and prompted me to discuss a range of issues. One troubling one is The New York Times’ and Literary Hub’s respective lists of the “best

I wrote this months ago and forgot to post it. My summer started with Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness, a film that I find below my expectation, even after two viewings—first in the cinema, then on Disney+. My problems were two: the film’s dramatization of the multiverse is underwhelming and the film’s scope itself is

Then a month later, on another flight over an actual sea, the Mediterranean, I almost wished I had not boarded the plane.

Every time I share the story of how I started writing, I list my major steps and omit, sometimes forget, some small but nurturing moments. One such moment came ten years ago, in my first year at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, a full year before I knew I would even be a writer. It

A thread of coincidences: a film ending from my late ‘90s childhood, a song from a talk show late last year, a magazine article minutes ago. This is how they gathered. I was surfing my Google Chrome recommendations, one piece opened into another, and I clicked on this listicle on badass Black women film characters.

Professor Nnadozie Inyama taught us “African Fiction” in my third year at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 2012-13. It was a straightforward course, with a pile of novels to be read, mostly novels from the African Writers Series. I was 18, had newly decided to become a serious writer, and, although I did not