Chigozie Obioma was born in 1986 in Akure, Nigeria. He has lived in Nigeria, Cyprus and Turkey, and currently resides in the United States, where he is a professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

A recipient of Hopwood Awards in fiction and poetry, his fiction has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review and Transition. The Fishermen is his first novel and has been translated into 17 languages. The Fishermen was short-listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was the winner of the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction.