Judging the Booker was an intense process

INTERVIEW Chigozie Obioma, writer

- ANJULY MATHAI

Both of Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma's novels— The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019)—were instant hits and were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. They have won several prizes, including the FT/ Oppenheimer Award for Fiction and the LA Times Book prize. He was also one of the Booker Prize judges in 2021. His next novel, The Road to the Country, about the Nigerian-Biafran War, will be out next year and can be summed up by an African proverb: “The story of a war can only be fully and truly told by both the living and the dead.”

In both his novels, Obioma blurs the line between the living and the dead. In The Fishermen, for example, written when the writer was just in his 20s, there are soothsayers, spirits, prophets and madmen. The story elaborates on the relationship between the nine-year-old protagonist and his three brothers, and the way in which their family slowly unravels under the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. His second book, An Orchestra of Minorities, narrated by a 'chi' or the spirit of a young poultry farmer, delves even more into the supernatural.