I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.

Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.

This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.

There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.