Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

Dec 3, 2024 | chukwuderaedozi.medium.com | Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera·Follow10 min read·Dec 4, 2024--Photo Credit: Booksellers NGReading Emanuel Iduma’s memoir, “I am Still With You” made me think of the silences in families in our part of the world, which is usually our way of dealing with trauma and grief. Most times when a young person dies in painful circumstances. The family often chooses to move on, and avoid talking about it as time goes on, in the hopes of burying the pain in silence.

Nov 25, 2024 | opencountrymag.com | Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera |Joseph Heller

When Umar Abubakar Sidi appeared at the Umuofia Arts and Books Festival in August, an audience member asked him about his writing style. For years, the Navy pilot-cum-poet had worked in a surrealistic mode, producing books that disobey order and tinker with conventions of form and structure. The first, The Poet of Dust, released in 2019, is influenced by Sufism. The poems often included chants and lamentations about dust and the particulate nature of the universe.

Nov 8, 2024 | chukwuderaedozi.medium.com | Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera·Follow4 min read·--Hamza Koudri’s “Sand Roses” is a novel about twin sisters, Salima and Fahima who are dancers in a city called Boussada, in Camusean Algeria in the 1930s. Both sisters are an interesting combination of characters; Salima is vicious and wide-eyed, Fahima is stubborn and naive.

Aug 16, 2024 | republic.com.ng | Chimezie Chika |Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

Nigerian writer and author of ‘Ndidi Dike’s Thesis on the Nigerian Condition’, Chimezie Chika believes that fidelity to the quality of work is what makes an artist or artwork timeless: ‘I think art has a lot to do with quality—and I mean quality as substance: the quality of colour, the quality of light, the quality of strokes, the quality of mood, the quality of thought, and the quality of ideas.

Aug 5, 2024 | opencountrymag.com | Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

The poet Janetta Marilyn Konah grew up not knowing any literary bookstore in her country, Liberia, but it was in late 2015, in the final months of the Ebola epidemic, when the country was in recovery and she and a friend ran the length of the capital city of Monrovia in search of novels by Africans, that she understood the direness of the situation. “The bookstores we found had books from the 1950s,” she said, “and they weren’t literature – they were books on science, mathematics, history.