Christopher Abani

Writer who seeks connections across global, racial, gender, and political lines. His narratives mark a shift in African and diasporic literatures from the local and national to a more human perspective. In fiction he is equally at home with small canvases (short story, novella) and with novels, always elevating his narratives into transformational allegories of triumph over sometimes unimaginable difficulties. His imagination is firmly grounded in tradition, rigor, and intertextuality. Whether his work be about failure, revenge, reparation, or transformation, he does not reduce the human to a common story of trauma, but nevertheless, in speaking to particularities, he elevates the work to the universal.