Chigozie Obioma: The Road to the Country

This London exclusive event brings together readings, conversation and audience questions with one of Nigeria’s major novelists, hailed by the New York Times as the heir to Chinua Achebe.

Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, The Road to the Country is the epic story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt and shame who must go to war to free himself.

Intertwining myth and realism into a thrilling, inspired, and emotionally powerful novel, The Road to the Country is destined to stand alongside Half of a Yellow Sun as the defining novel of one of the most devastating civil wars of the 20th century.

Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian award-winning writer whose first novel, The Fishermen, was a finalist for the Booker prize and won a number of prizes including an NAACP Image award, an LA Art Seidenbaum award, among others and was translated into 26 languages. His second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities was also shortlisted for the Booker prize.

Ayòbámi Adébáyò was born in Lagos, Nigeria. Her debut novel, Stay With Me, won the 9mobile Prize for Literature, was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Wellcome Book Prize and the Kwani Manuscript Prize. It has been translated into twenty languages and the French translation was awarded the Prix Les Afriques. Her second novel, A Spell of Good Things was longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Ayòbámi Adébàyò splits her time between Norwich and Lagos.