Uzodinma Iweala

Uzodinma Iweala at a reading at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 17, 2008

Uzodinma Chukuka Iweala (born November 5, 1982 in Washington, DC ) is an American writer .

Life

Iweala comes from the Nigerian Igbo people ; his father Ikemba Iweala works as a neurosurgeon at the Providence Hospital in Washington , while his mother, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala , was Vice President of the World Bank and later Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs of Nigeria . He grew up with his parents and siblings (one older sister, two younger brothers) in Potomac , Montgomery County , Maryland, a suburb of Washington. He attended the St. Albans School (STA) in Washington operated by the Washington National Cathedral and then studied creative writingat Harvard University .

While in school he came across a Newsweek article about child soldiers in Africa. The topic has never let go of him since then and became the subject of his senior thesis at Harvard. In 2004 he graduated magna cum laude and received the Hoopes Prize and the Dorothy Hicks Lee Prize at Harvard for the outstanding undergraduate thesis . From this, in turn, he developed his first novel, Beasts of No Nation, about a nine-year-old West African child soldier named Agu . Iweala's supervisor, the writer Jamaica Kincaid , had encouraged him to choose the first person as the narrative perspective . Kincaid also assisted Iweala in signing a book deal with HarperCollins . His first work was published there in autumn 2005.

The novel was widely praised; The Times of London spoke of Iweala as a "promising new voice" and Salman Rushdie was impressed too. Iweala received the 2006 Discover Award for his novel , was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers 'Prize for Best African First Work (won by Doreen Baingana ), and was awarded the American Academy of Arts' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and Letters and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize .

The reader is put right in the head, in the world of experiences of the boy who loses his father and whose mother and sister leave him. He is captured by soldiers and faced with the choice of either joining in and killing himself or losing his life. Killing repels him, he vomits - and still hacks up his opponents with a machete until they hardly look like a human. He feels terribly guilty, but experiences himself as a “man”, sees himself as “not a bad boy”, as someone who only does his “duty as a soldier” - and experiences the barbaric fascination of killing. He wants to escape the slaughter, but on the other hand is as if hypnotized and more and more succumb to an instinctive drive. “Killing”, his commandant tells him one day, “is like falling in love”. In the child's head there is "neither past nor future, only emotions that shake him up, a chaos of aggressiveness and passivity."

As a linguistic form, Iweala chose a language that is reminiscent of Nigerian pidgin English , but, according to Iweala in an interview at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008, is an artificial language he invented, which also includes forms of childlike speech. He surprises the reader with the power of this “child's language”, its imperfections, its images. The voice, the rhythm, even the 'poetry' are something completely new. "

The book was filmed in 2014 by Cary Fukunaga . Netflix secured the worldwide distribution rights . The film was released on Netflix and in various cinemas around the world in 2015.

After graduating from Harvard, he spent a long time in Nigeria for the first time, where he worked, among other things, in a refugee camp in northern Nigeria. His mother was Nigeria's finance minister at the time. He then worked from February 2006 for a year in New York City for the non-profit Millennium Villages Project . In 2007 he wrote his second novel in Nigeria and finally began studying medicine at Columbia University in the fall of 2007 . He is also a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review .

Works

• Beasts of No Nation . Thesis (Bachelor of Arts, Honors in English and American Literature and Language), Harvard University, 2004.
• Beasts of No Nation . HarperCollins, New York 2005. ISBN 0-06-079867-X .
  • German edition: You should be a beast! Ammann, Zurich 2008. ISBN 978-3-250-60119-7 . Translation by Marcus Ingendaay .
  • as Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-596-18449-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/nvs/ikemba-iweala-in-sex-extortion-update.html
2. ^ ^{A b} Barnes & Noble: Meet the Writers
3. ↑ ^{a b} Dinitia Smith: Young and Privileged, but Writing Vividly of Africa's Child Soldiers (New York Times, November 24, 2005)
4. ↑ “Uzodinma Iweala's is a confident and promising new voice” - Anita Sethi: No more child (The Times, September 23, 2005)
5. ↑ "It's one of those rare occasions when you see a first novel and you think, This guy is going to be very, very good ." - Dave Weich: Clowning with Salman Rushdie ( Memento of the original from March 31, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (powells.com, September 23, 2005) 
6. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated February 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ ^{a b} Florence Noiville: Uzodinma Iweala, une enfance en enfer , Le Monde, September 26, 2008, littératures p. 3
9. ↑ Netflix's Beasts of No Nation boycotted by big four US cinema chains at theguardian.com, accessed July 31, 2015
10. ↑ Uzodinma Iweala: Trickle-down economics (New Statesman, January 16, 2006)
11. ↑ Victor Nzeh: Uzodinma Iweala, a Natural Born Writer ( Memento of the original from October 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (AfricanWriter.com, May 31, 2007) 
12. ↑ Marcus Franklin: Young Author Iweala Set for Med School (Associated Press, February 11, 2007)

Web links

• Literature by and about Uzodinma Iweala in the catalog of the German National Library