![]() ![]() What happens in the book is a version of a real event – the Odi massacre in 1999. At the same time, it is not a place you can romanticise – even from afar. In Americanah there’s this idea that life is happening outside and then you get into the great outside and realise that life was happening in Lagos. When I went to Lagos to visit I began to question things and not just passively move through the city. I started writing in primary school but Lagos wasn’t a place where I set my fiction until I moved to England. In the acknowledgments you thank “Lagos, city of my birth, my dreams, my frustrations, my imagination”… ![]() I’d also just read Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and I really liked the ensemble cast. The impetus, the seed of the idea was that dream. I was going to write a novel about a teenager moving to England, which would have been incredibly autobiographical because I moved to England aged 14 – but I wouldn’t have been able to write it with detachment and humour. What was the inspiration behind your second novel? ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |