Reading Nigeria

Nigeria is on the literary map. Two of the country's writers have won major literary prizes recently. Chinua Achebe (author of the classic Things Fall Apart) won this year's Man Booker International Prize for his career, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.

And it turns out that Adichie actually grew up in a house once occupied by Achebe. How's that for a promising literary pedigree?

Nigeria's Daily Sun newspaper is hosting a forum in which readers compare the two authors both to each other and to Olaudah Equiano, who is argubably Nigeria's first author for his book The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. The comments make for a very interesting glimpse of a writing scene little known in the US.--David E