Chigozie Obioma, author of “The Fishermen,” will be at Sterling College on Sept. 22, to read from his fiction. Obioma’s “The Fishermen” has been named to more than a dozen best book of the year lists, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times Best Book Review. The college will host Obioma at 2:30 p.m. in Cornerstone in the Student Union and a signing will take place immediately afterward. The public is invited to attend this free event.
“We are delighted to bring Chigozie to campus for a reading. ‘The Fishermen’ is a powerful novel and has garnered much well-deserved attention from around the world. I am most excited, however, for the warm and generous spirit Chigozie will bring to this campus, and I look forward to seeing our students interact and ask questions from a rising author,” said Aaron Brown, assistant professor of writing and editing.
Obioma was born in Nigeria and has lived in Cyprus, Turkey, and the United States. He currently resides in Nebraska where he is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. With the success “The Fishermen” has received, the New York Times calls Obioma the “heir to Chinua Achebe,” the Nigerian author of “Things Fall Apart.” Obioma’s nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Guardian and elsewhere.
A finalist for the Man Booker Prize, “The Fishermen” is Obioma’s debut novel, earning him the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Debut Literary Work. It is currently available in 12 languages with 12 additional languages in process.