Chigozie Obioma to read at Edinburgh book festival

Adeola Ogunrinde |

Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma is to read and discuss about his first novel “The Fishermen” to a wide audience at this year’s Edinburgh International book festival which comes up from 15th to 31st of August 2015. Obioma will be on stage with Scottish author Simon Sylvester at the festival. These two highly promising authors will share their ideas with Economist literary editor Fiammetta Rocco.

The Fishermen is set in a small town in Nigeria in the mid-1990s. Four brothers use their strict father’s absence from home to go fishing in a forbidden river and encounter a dangerous local madman, whose mystic prophecy predicts that one of the brothers a fisherman will kill another. This event causes a deep rift between the brothers, unleashing a tragic chain of events.

A gorgeously written novel that illuminates Nigeria in all its historical, political and cultural complexity. Booker Prize-winning author Eleanor Catton described the novel as ‘crackling with life, freighted with death, vertiginous both in its style and in the elemental power of its story.

Obioma has lived in Cyprus, Turkey, and America where he completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. It was his birthplace of Nigeria, however, that was the inspiration for his first novel, The Fishermen.