“The
privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and
to consider things.”—Chris Abani
Abani, who is celebrating his 50th
birthday today, is an award-winning Nigerian and U.S. author of 4 novels,
numerous novellas, short stories and plays, and 7 books of poetry. He started writing young and was so good at
skewering those in power that he was imprisoned 3 times by the Nigerian
government. The first time came after
his first novel– Masters of the Board
– came out at age 16. His second novel,
Sirocco, published shortly after his
release, got him right back in jail where he continued writing and produced a
number of anti-government plays. Their
production got him sentenced to death, but he escaped to England where he continued
his education and writing after being awarded a PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom
to Write Award, the literary world’s response to those injustices.
In the past 15 years he has won
nearly three dozen major awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction,
the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a California
Book Award, given while he served as a Professor of Creative Writing at
UC-Riverside. Today he holds the prestigious
Board of Trustees Professor of English Chair at Northwestern University.
He is an avid supporter of the World
Wide Web as writing and publishing resource, and selections of his poetry have
often appeared in the online journal Blackbird. “Like most writers, I find the Web
is a wonderful distraction,” he said.
“Who doesn't need that last minute research before writing?”
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