Uwem Akpan reads from ‘New York, My Village’ at Lagos, Ibadan RovingHeights bookstores

THE celebrated author of short story collection, Say You’re One of Them will entertain audiences from his latest war novel, New York, My Village in Lagos on Saturday, June 28, 2025 at Roving Heights bookstore, Landmark Event Centre, Oniru, Victoria Island and Ibadan on Sunday, June July 5, 2025 at Prime Mall, 33 Awolowo Avenue, Bodija. Time for both events is 2.00pm – 4.00pm. While Akpan will hold conversation that’s moderated by Ijeoma Ucheibe in Lagos, Tope-EniObanke Adegoke will moderate the Ibadan reading event. Like many Nigerian academics in the global North, Akpan is coming home to read from his critically acclaimed novel.

Akpan gained literary prominence with his searing first collection of short stories Say You’re One of Them published in 2008, a collection of five stories (each set in a different African country), published by Little, Brown & Company. His debut book achieved international success by winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region), the PEN Open Book Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was picked for the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, New York Times and Wall Street Journal No. 1 bestseller, the book has been translated into 12 languages. Akpan’s second book and debut novel, New York, My Village (2021), was published by W. W. Norton, US and Parresia Publishing in Nigeria. The book was picked by Strand Bookstore as their Pick of the Month for November 2021.

It took Akpan, who teaches Creative Writing at the University of Florida, US, serious research to come up with New York, My Village, a book that takes on multiple warfronts – Biafra army’s brutality in minority areas of the Niger Delta, white publishing landscape in America and terrorism in Nigeria. Perhaps, it’s in unearthing Biafra behaviour as an army of occupation and its atrocities among minority areas that the book is most intense and resonant, as it challenges the dominant single war narrative that the world has come to know from writers about the war.

Akpan’s New York, My Village explores the negative impact of the Nigerian Civil War on minorities of the Niger Delta. Minorities of the Niger Delta bore the brunt of the war as the territory changed hands between the two warring (Nigerian and Biafran) armies with dire consequences to the locals who were made to switch allegiances in the brutal war for their resource rich wealth and daily survival.

Writers of Igbo extraction like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) and Chigozie Obioma (The Road to the Country) in recent memory have made capital gains from writing about the war and have gone on to seize victimhood narrative from it. However, Niger Delta minority writers like Akpan are just emerging from the scars and shadows of that war to shed light on what really happened with their creative works. One party to the war won and the other lost, but the Niger Delta has remained under siege since the brutal war ended in January 1970. Largely, Akpan’s New York, My Village accepts “the single story narrative” challenge posed by venerable Chinua Achebe and amplified by his literary daughter Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, to lend a narrative voice to the largely ignored but brutalised Nigeria Delta minorities.

Source: TheArtHub