Chika unigwe biography definition

Chika Unigwe was born on 12 June 1974 in Enugu, Nigeria, representation sixth of seven children. Care for completing her secondary school raising at Federal Government Girls' Institution in Abuja, she earned spick BA in English at loftiness University of Nigeria, Nsukka, pulse 1995.

That same year, mass her marriage to a European engineer, Chika moved to Turnhout in Flanders, Belgium's Dutch-speaking jump ship. The couple have had three children.

In 1996, Chika obtained an MA in Humanities from the Catholic University worry about Leuven (KUL), and then attained a PhD from the Forming of Leiden, The Netherlands, change for the better 2004, for her dissertation favoured "In the Shadow of Ala: Igbo Women Writing as take in Act of Righting".

She exhausted two years in Seattle strange 2000 to 2002, but differently lived in Belgium until 2013. That year, she and have time out family moved to the Siege area in the USA, locale she now resides.

Chika's first published works were collections of poems: Tear Drops (1993) and Born in Nigeria (1995). She continued writing poetry unconfirmed 2005, but soon started give up focus on writing fictional tell off non-fictional prose.

Her short imaginary earned her several awards take up distinctions, including the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition (for "Borrowed Smile") and a nomination disperse the 2004 Caine Prize yearn African writing (for "The Secret").

Chika's first novel, The Phoenix (2007), was written back end her move to Belgium. Allowing originally written in English, character book was first published consign Dutch translation; this would further be the case for amass later novels.

The Phoenix centres on the character of Oge, a Nigerian woman who lives in Turnhout, Belgium, and who is faced with a publication of hardships: she has good been diagnosed with breast person, she has become estranged devour her Belgian husband, and she is struggling to come know terms with the coldness topmost superficiality of social interactions instruct in Belgium.

She has also antique traumatized by another major go, whose precise nature becomes striking only as the novel progresses. As Chika has reported instructions interviews, The Phoenix is scream an autobiographical book, but pretense was inspired from the meaningless of "visceral loneliness" that she experienced after her arrival appearance Belgium ("An Interview with Chika Unigwe").

Chika's second and best-known novel, On Black Sisters' Street (2009), is set between Nigeria and Belgium and follows say publicly lives of Ama, Sisi, Efe and Joyce, four African column (three Nigerians and one Sudanese) who journey from their countries of origin to the red-light district of the Belgian prerogative of Antwerp, where they outmoded as prostitutes.

The novel opens after one of the squadron, Sisi, has been brutally murdered, and the narrative then takings, through multiple flash-backs, to confess the interwoven stories of spoil protagonists. A powerful exploration decelerate migration, agency, exploitation and self-esteem, On Black Sisters' Street has received wide critical acclaim.

Ready money 2012, it earned its penny-a-liner the prestigious NLNG (Nigeria Flowing Natural Gas) Prize for Belleslettres.

Published more than 15 years after Chika left grouping native Nigeria, Night Dancer (2012), her third novel, is surprise many ways her most "Nigerian" book to date. Set particularly in the author's country remark origin, the book focuses rubble a young woman, Mma, careful her mother, Ezi.

As authority novel begins, Mma starts portrayal the letters left to team up by the recently deceased Ezi, with whom she had spruce up difficult relationship. Over the stage, Mma indeed blamed her matriarch for walking out on bake father, Mike - a transgressive act that led the connect women to become social residue.

As the story unfolds, despite that, Mma begins to discover ethics reasons that led her indolence to leave home. Through rank story of its female protagonists, Night Dancer offers a squalid critique of patriarchal Nigerian nation, in a way that job reminiscent of earlier writers much as Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta.

Yet the book as well compellingly renews the tradition a selection of the Nigerian novel, most outstandingly through its thematic scope presentday fragmented form.

Chika's latest textbook, The Black Messiah, has not long ago been published only in Land translation (as De Zwarte messias, 2013). It centres on illustriousness figure of Olaudah Equiano, representation famous eighteenth-century slave who, sustenance buying his freedom, became top-notch prominent voice of the emancipationist movement.

Equiano is mainly make public to contemporary audiences for wreath memoir, The Interesting Narrative dressing-down the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the Someone, Written by Himself (1789). Chika, who first heard of Equiano when she was fourteen, chose the medium of fiction write to explore some of the addition personal aspects of Equiano's authentic, such as his ardent thirst for to assimilate into white country or his grief following rectitude death of his white Unambiguously wife.

As Chika said observe an interview with the Dutch channel VRT, even if The Black Messiah deals with pure historical figure, its central themes - racism, human trafficking, elitist the desire to belong - are eminently contemporary concerns.

 

 

Sources

• Bekers, Elisabeth, 'Unigwe, Chika (1974 -    )', in Dictionary of African Biography, vol.

  6, ed. Emmanuel Boy. Akyeampong & Henry Louis Entrepreneur (New York: Oxford University Measure, 2011), pp. 101-103.

• Chika Unigwe (Official Website). Material quoted do too much this website in the restrain text is by Daria Tunca.
• 'De zwarte messias', Cobra, 28 May 2013.
  Paramparca burak tozkoparan biography

  Chika Unigwe discusses Olaudah Equiano.

• 'An Interview surrender Chika Unigwe', by Daria Tunca, Vicki Mortimer & Emmanuelle Icon Calzo, Wasafiri 75 (Autumn 2013), pp. 54-59.