New African Novels: A Conversation with Eloghosa Osunde and Okwiri Oduor, by Anderson Tepper

Interviews Eloghosa Osunde and Okwiri Oduor. Photo of Oduor by Chelsea Bieker. It’s hard to argue with Booker Prize–winning author Damon Galgut’s assertion that 2021 was “a great year for African writing.” And as WLT’s “New African Voices” issue helped make clear, 2022 is shaping up to be one as well. Here, then, are two debut novelists who give us every reason to believe the richness and variety of writing from the continent is no passing trend: Nigerian Eloghosa Osunde, author of Vagabonds!, a kaleidoscopic vision of Lagos’s outcasts and outlaws (published in March by Riverhead Books); and Kenyan Okwiri Oduor, author of Things They Lost, which captures a vivid, incantatory world through the eyes of a solitary twelve-year-old girl (published in April by Scribner). Anderson Tepper: Eloghosa, did you set out to write Vagabonds! as a novel or as a collection of vignettes of life in Lagos that you then stitched into a cohesive whole? Eloghosa Osunde: Neither. I set out to write a book of fiction where the individual stories were given momentum by a narrator’s perspective, in a particular sequence, to create a specific rhythm. Beyond the above categories, this book is that. Tepper: Tell us more about the animating spirits of Lagos and particularly Tatafo, the book’s fiery, gossipy, all-seeing narrator? Osunde: They are angels and monitoring spirits moving in favor of Eko, who is the chief spirit of the city, their creator.... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2022-04-21 13:41:40 UTC ]
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