1. Chika Unigwe was the winner of the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2012 for her novel On Black Sisters' Street.
16 Facts About Chika Unigwe
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Chika Unigwe is on the Board of Trustees of pan-African literary initiative Writivism, and set up the Awele Creative Trust in Nigeria to support young writers.
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Chika Unigwe has served as a Man Booker International judge and chair of the judges for the Caine Prize for African Writing.
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Chika Unigwe was born in 1974 in Enugu, the capital city of Enugu State, southeastern Nigeria, the sixth of her parents' seven children.
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Chika Unigwe attended secondary school at Federal Government Girls' college in Abuja and obtained a BA in English in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1995.
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In 2003, while a student in Belgium, Chika Unigwe won the BBC World Service Short Story Competition for her story "Borrowed Smile".
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In 2019, Chika Unigwe published Better Never Than Late, a collection of linked short stories about Nigerian immigrants in Belgium, with Cassava Republic Press.
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Chika Unigwe was included in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.
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In 2020, Chika Unigwe contributed "Two Happy Meals", to The middle of a sentence, an anthology of very short fiction featuring commissions from contemporary writers, new submissions, and selections from literature.
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In 2021, Chika Unigwe was shortlisted for the Dzanc Books Diverse Voices Award.
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Chika Unigwe published her most recent novel, The Middle Daughter, in 2023.
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Chika Unigwe attended the 2013 Adelaide festival in Australia, where she met an Aboriginal chief and an Aboriginal writer.
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Chika Unigwe has written on Boko Haram, Nigerian religious tradition, and environmental activism.
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Chika Unigwe sits on the Board of Trustees of pan-African literary initiative Writivism, and set up the Awele Creative Trust in Nigeria to support young writers.
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In 2016, Chika Unigwe was appointed as the Bonderman Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
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In 2023, Chika Unigwe was knighted into the Order of the Crown by the Belgian Government for her contributions to literature and services to the Belgian nation.