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.
Obioma
£6.998 year-old Obioma is a football star. She uses a special stick to score goals and never loses a race in her wheelchair! But when she moves to a new city, she has to go to a new school where she has no friends, and everyone calls her “the girl with the wheelchair”. Obioma misses playing football most of all, until one day a girl named Ayana asks her to race. Once they start playing football, everyone joins in and Obioma finds a new team to play with!
Cassava Shorts
From £9.99Our new short story series will showcase gripping stories by celebrated and emerging authors, which will hook you from the first word. Cassava Shorts showcase the power of the short story to give readers a concentrated shot of high-quality writing, whilst exploring in microcosm timely and important themes.
CRP Publishing Director Bibi Bakare-Yusuf says,
“With this new series, we want to celebrate the short story’s potential to reactivate a love of good old-fashioned story telling in pithy form. At a time when so much is competing for our attention, short stories are a quick way to get immense in a world and still feeling satiated. Some of my most explosive and evocative reads have been the short story form. So, I am very excited to introduce this series by some of the best-known and emerging writers from across the African world.”
Better Never Than Late
From £2,000.00Better Never Than Late charts the unconventional lives and love affairs of a group of Nigerian migrants, making their way in Belgium. The collection is centred around Prosperous and her husband Agu, and the various visitors who gather at their apartment each week. These interconnected stories explore their struggles and triumphs, from unhappy marriages (of convenience or otherwise), to the pain of homesickness, and the tragic paradox in longing to leave Nigeria so that you may one day return to it.