These are vast topics, but this is resolutely a character novel. It is unafraid to tackle seismic and problematic issues – colourism, religious wars and oppressive patriarchy – through the eyes of a young man grappling with the long shadow of colonialism and the yearning for a better life for what he calls his ‘cursed continent’. The novel begins as boldly as it goes on, with the line ‘Dear White People’ followed by a description of Andy’s obsession with white, blonde women. The dominance of Western influence on Andy is a recurring theme. I wanted to capture these key moments of coming of age.” “We all wanted to be Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, to be superheroes. “Growing up, we were engulfed by Western culture,” Buoro explains. “Writing fiction gave me power – you feel like a god of your own world,” he says. He describes a sensation of powerlessness during his youth in Nigeria, and how writing was his liberation. He apologises for “being better at writing my ideas than talking about them”.īuoro’s novel has been declared a ‘condition of Africa’ tome by its publisher, a heavy mantle deservedly applied.

We are having coffee in London and Buoro, a voracious reader who views books as portals to other worlds, has just arrived from Norwich, where he is studying for a PhD in creative and critical writing. Mathematics, science fiction, Afrofuturism.” It was written in snatched notes on his Blackberry, inspired by the encyclopaedias in his school library and a copy of Ulysses downloaded to a small Motorola flip phone. Bittersweet, movingly rendered and formally audacious in its direction, it is the first move of an undeniable new literary talent.īuoro, who was a maths teacher in Nigeria before moving to the UK, says of the novel’s first drafts: “I brought all my fascinations to the book.

It tells the tragi-comic tale of Andy, a teenager growing up in Kontagora, Nigeria, who falls in love with a white girl as sectarian violence descends on his home and a mysterious man arrives claiming to be his father. The 30-year-old Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship recipient has just released his debut novel The Five Sorrowful Mysteries Of Andy Africa. If his name is unfamiliar, it won’t be for long. These are the unlikely building blocks of Stephen Buoro’s literary career. Maths, Marvel movies, an encyclopaedia and a Blackberry.

Dewey's nine lives book