Chika Unigwe was born June 1974 in Enugu, Nigeria. After completing her secondary school education at Federal Government Girl’s College, Abuja, she went on to earn a BA in English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1995. She has four children with Belgian engineer, whom she married in 1995. Following the marriage Chika moved to Turnhout in Flanders, Belgium’s Dutch-speaking region.

In 1996, she obtained an MA in English from the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL), and then earned a PhD from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, in 2004, for her dissertation entitled “In the Shadow of Ala: Igbo Women Writing as an Act of Righting”.

Chika spent two years in Seattle from 2000 to 2002, but otherwise resided in Belgium until 2013. During that time, she pursued her writing career, but also engaged in other activities, such as sitting on the Turnhout town council, and teaching Flemish to immigrants. In 2013, she moved to the Atlanta area in the USA.

Chika is Creative Director of the Awele Creative Trust, and she was a judge for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. In 2016-2017, she was Bonderman Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University, Providence RI, USA, and then went on to lecture in creative writing at Emory University, GA. In 2020-2021, she will be joining Georgia College and State University’s MFA in Creative Writing as a core faculty member.