Chika Unigwe

Chika Unigwe

Chika Unigwe is a Nigerian author who writes in English and Dutch. The writer’s debut novel, De Feniks, was published in 2005 by Meulenhoff and Manteau and was shortlisted for the Vrouw en Kultuur debuutprijs, for the best debut novel by a female writer. Chika Unigwe’s second novel, Fata Morgana, was published in Dutch in 2008 and subsequently released in English as On Black Sisters’ Street. She is also the author of two children’s books published by Macmillan, London. 

Chika Unigwe has published short fiction in several anthologies, journals and magazines including Wasafiri (University of London), Moving Worlds (University of Leeds), Per Contra, Voices of the University of Wisconsin and Okike of the University of Nigeria. 

The author obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in the English Language from the University of Nigeria Nsukka in 1995, a Master of Arts degree in English from the KU Leuven (KUL, the Catholic University of Leuven) in 1996 and a doctorate in Literature (2004) from the University of Leiden, Netherlands.

Chika’s work has accorded her several writing awards and prizes. She won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition and a Commonwealth Short Story Competition award. In 2004, she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing and in the same year, her short story made the top 10 of the Million Writers Award for best online fiction. In 2005, Chika won third prize in the Equiano Fiction Contest and in 2012, Zukiswa Wanner in The Guardian rated her as one of the “top five African writers”. In the same year, she floored Olushola Olugbesan’s Only A Canvass and Ngozi Achebe’s Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter to clinch the coveted $100,000 Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature, becoming the second Diaspora writer to win the prize. 

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Chika was selected for the 2014 Hay Festival’s Africa39 list of 39 under 40 Sub-Saharan African writers, with the potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. In 2016, she was appointed as the Bonderman Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. 2017 saw Chika become a visiting professor at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. In November 2020, she began writing a weekly column for Nigeria’s Daily Trust and in 2021, she was shortlisted for Dzanc Books Diverse Voices Award.

Chika sits on the Board of Trustees of pan-African literary initiative Writivism,  and contributes to the Awele Creative Trust in Nigeria to support young writers. 

She is the recipient of the following fellowships:

• 2007 Unesco-Aschberg Fellowship for creative writing
• 2009 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (Bellagio Centre, Italy) 
• 2011 HALD Fellowship (HALD Centre, Denmark) 
• 2011 and 2016 Writing Fellowship at the Ledig House (Omi NY, USA) 
• 2013 Writing Fellowing at Cove Park (Scotland) 
• 2014 Writer-in-Residence, Haverford College (Philadelphia PA, USA) 
• 2014 Sylt Fellowship for African Writers

Chika Unigwe is inspired by the works of distinguished writers like Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, and Buchi Emecheta.

Read more about her on chikaunigwe.com