I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

The thing that comes most frequently to me on yoga retreats is excruciating pain in my hips.

I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.

I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!

The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.

I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.

So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.