Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

Igbo-Ukwu

Writer. Dreamer. Novelist. Editor @VoiceoftheEast. Director @UmuofiaBookfest “Loss is an Aftertaste of Memories” out now!

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Articles

Musih Tedji Xaviere’s These Letters End in Tears: Love’s Sturdiness in the Face of Tragedy

1 week ago | chukwuderaedozi.medium.com | Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

Musih Tedji Xaviere’s “These Letters End in Tears” (Masobe Books, 2024) is the latest offering of novels from Cameroun’s slow and steady trickle of fantastic novelists (that I have read). A Cameroonian writer does not pop up every year on my screen, but when one does, it is almost always a delight, from oldies like Mongo Beti and Calixthe Beyala; to the contemporaries like Patrice Nganang, to Imbolo Mbue and now Musih Tadjiere Xaviere.
Fireflies on the Lagoon: Tunde Leye’s Impressive Stab At History

1 week ago | chukwuderaedozi.medium.com | Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

IkeGod Chielo calls Tunde Leye’s Fireflies on the Lagoon, “A Lagos Game of thrones.” There is no term more apt to describe Tunde Leye’s 250-paged historical thriller which retells the story of the Lagoon, a Yoruba pre-colony in the 19th century. Yoruba land, which extends from Nigeria throughout parts of Togo and Benin, is one of the most interesting nations of Africa that preceded the colonial amalgamation of nations that resulted in Nigeria.
Reintroducing Anyafulugo, Writer, Thinker and Musician

3 weeks ago | chukwuderaedozi.medium.com | Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera·Follow4 min read·--Music is something MarkAnthony Obumneme Osuchukwu, known as Anyafulugo, always wanted to do. But Anyafulugo’s family was also a deeply religious one, who went to a church whose members are taught that secular music is the devil’s music and avoided it like plague.
Nnamdi Ehirim’s “The Brevity of Beautiful Things” and the Lessons from Memory

3 weeks ago | chukwuderaedozi.medium.com | Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera·Follow5 min read·--from Ouida Books Twitter PageYoung adult years are often full of conflictions of self, paranoia, and continuation of the sexual crisis, which begins in adolescence.
Our Top Stories of 2024

Jan 14, 2025 | opencountrymag.com | Paula Willie-Okafor |Iheoma Uzomba |Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera |Michael Aromolaran |Otosirieze Obi-Young

Our top stories of 2024 are not so much our most-read pieces as they are the pieces that reflect the range of subjects we covered in the year, and that we therefore recommend, in case you missed reading them. They show our deep work in finding untold stories, contextualizing developments in African literature and Nollywood, and highlighting the shapers of culture and industries.
The Strength and Pitfalls of Emmanuel Iduma’s I Am Still With You

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.
A Navy Pilot Pivoted to Writing, Spurred by Surrealists

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.
Book Review: Sand Roses by Hamza Koudri

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.
The Nigerian City That Inspires Chimezie Chika’s Writing

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.
Liberia, Africa's Oldest Modern Country, Has No Literary Bookstore. Why?

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.