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

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

When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.

When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.

The summer I finished my first novel Ghana Must Go, I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lomé to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.

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.