Chika Nina Unigwe//ⓘ (born 12 June 1974) is a
Nigerian-born
Igbo author[1] who writes in
English and
Dutch. In April 2014 she was selected for the
Hay Festival's
Africa39 list of 39
Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature.[2][3] Previously based in
Belgium, she now lives in the United States.[4]
Biography
Chika Unigwe was born in 1974 in
Enugu, Nigeria, the sixth of her parents' seven children. She attended secondary school at Federal Government Girls' college in
Abuja and obtained a BA in English in the
University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1995. In 1996, she earned an MA degree in English from the
KU Leuven (KUL, the Catholic University of Leuven).[5] She has a Ph.D in Literature (2004) from the
University of Leiden in the
Netherlands. Her
debut novel, De Feniks, was published in 2005 by
Meulenhoff and
Manteau (of
Amsterdam and
Antwerp, respectively) and was shortlisted for the Vrouw en Kultuur debuutprijs for the best first novel by a female writer.[6] She is also the author of two children's books published by Macmillan,
London.[7]
Her first novel, De Feniks, was published in Dutch in September 2005 and is the first book of fiction written by a
Flemish author of African origin.[14] Her second novel, Fata Morgana, was published in Dutch in 2008 and subsequently released in English as On Black Sisters' Street.[15]On Black Sisters' Street is about African prostitutes living and working in
Belgium, and was published to acclaim in London in 2009 by
Jonathan Cape. On Black Sisters' Street won the 2012
Nigeria Prize for Literature;[16][17] valued at $100,000 it is Africa's largest literary prize.[18][19]
Also in 2012,
Zukiswa Wanner in The Guardian rated Unigwe as one of the "top five African writers".[20] Still in 2012, she floored Olushola Olugbesan's Only A Canvass and Ngozi Achebe's Onaedo: The Blacksmith's Daughter to clinch the coveted $100,000 Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas
NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature, becoming the second Diaspora writer to win the prize.[21]
She attended the 2013 Adelaide festival in Australia and for the first time met an Aboriginal chief. She was so moved by the story of the Aborigin in Australia and she wrote an article titled "what I'm thinking about ... forgiveness and healing".[22]
Unigwe sits on the Board of Trustees of pan-African literary initiative Writivism,[23] and set up the Awele Creative Trust in Nigeria to support young writers.[24] In April 2014, she was selected for the Festival's
Africa39 list of 39 sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in Africa.[25]
In 2019,
Cassava Republic Press in Abuja and London published Better Never Than Late, a new collection of linked short stories about Nigerian immigrants in Belgium.[32][33] In the same year she contributed to New Daughters of Africa, which was nominated for the
NAACP Awards for Outstanding Literary Work. It is a compilation of orature and literature by more than 200 women from Africa and the African diaspora, edited and introduced by
Margaret Busby, also the editor of the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, who compared the process of assembling it to "trying to catch a flowing river in a calabash".
In 2020, Unigwe contributed to The middle of a sentence: short prose anthology with "Two Happy Meals". The Common Breath Short Prose Anthology is a celebration of fiction in its shortest form, uniting work from some of the greatest contemporary novelists, alongside an exciting selection from TCB's open submissions process, and supplemented by pieces from a range of literary history's finest artists. In July of the same year, Ungwe was appointed a professor of creative writing at
Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.
In November 2020, she began writing a weekly column for Nigeria's Daily Trust.[34] In 2021, Unigwe was shortlisted for the Dzanc Books Diverse Voices Award.
Personal life
Unigwe formerly lived in
Turnhout,
Belgium, with her husband and four children.[35] She emigrated to the United States in 2013.[36] She writes in English and Dutch.[37]
Fellowships
2007: Unesco-Aschberg Fellowship for creative writing[38]
2009: Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (Bellagio Centre, Italy)[39]
2011: HALD Fellowship (HALD Centre, Denmark)[citation needed]
2011 and 2016: Writing Fellowship at the Ledig House (Omi NY, USA)[40]
2013: Writing Fellowing at Cove Park (Scotland)[41]
2014: Writer-in-Residence, Haverford College (Philadelphia PA, USA)[citation needed]
Zwart, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Atlas Contact, 2018. A collection of stories and essays in Dutch, collected and edited by
Vamba Sherif and Ebissé Rouw.
ISBN978-90-254-5154-7. Contains a story by Unigwe: Anekdotes om rond de tafel te vertellen.
Better Never Than Late. Cassava Republic Press, 2019.
ISBN978-1911115540
The Middle Of A Sentence: Short Prose Anthology. The Common Breath, 2020.
ISBN9781916064133