Analyst and author of ‘Ken Saro-Wiwa’s “Sozaboy”: What War Literature Teaches Us About the Political Economy of Violence’, Ndidi Akahara, is always excited to talk about history and literature: ‘reaching into the past offers us a wealth of experiences that can help inform how we live today. Good literature on the other hand, stretches our present circumstances to make room for the experiences and ideas of others.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
Growing up, I read quite a bit as we had an ever-expanding home library. When my parents noticed that I loved to read, they helped sustain our family library with all sorts of books. I read a lot of Jacqueline Wilson at first. I loved her stories, and I was incredibly proud of my Jacqueline Wilson collection in my pre-teen years. I also read quite a few classics, Dickens, Austen, the Brontë sisters. I loved the stories that featured young female protagonists like Jane Austen's Lizzy Bennet and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. My proudest achievement at age nine was almost finishing Jane Eyre, which seemed to me like the longest book in the world at the time. Of course, I told people that I had actually finished it because it wouldn’t satisfy my vanity to admit that I stopped reading the book 100 pages away from the end. However, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus was the first novel I read, where the protagonist was a young African girl and I have read it so much that the signed copy is now in pieces, but still very cherished.
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