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.

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.

I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

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'm not sure where I'm from! I was born in London. My father's from Ghana but lives in Saudi Arabia. My mother's Nigerian but lives in Ghana. I grew up in Boston.

How can I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept?