Chris Abani was born in Nigeria in 1967. In 1985 Abani was arrested and imprisoned for six months on suspicion of masterminding a political coup. It was suggested that the plot of his first novel, a thriller published two years earlier about the return of the Third Reich called Masters of the Board , had laid a blueprint for the coup. Abani was eighteen years old at the time.
Over the next five years, Abani would be imprisoned twice more. Upon the publication of Sirocco (1987), his second novel, Abani was accused of sedition and held for one year at Kiri-Kiri, a maximum security prison in Lagos, Nigeria. Released during a general amnesty, the young writer entered university and was arrested again in 1990, after a performance of his play Song for a Broken Flute that was attended by the head of state. Abani was convicted of treason and sentenced to death, spending the next eighteen months at Kiri-Kiri-six of them in solitary confinement-until concerned friends bribed prison officials to arrange for his escape.
Abani spent the next seven years in London, writing and speaking out against the regime in Nigeria. But when a neighbor was murdered in 1999, Abani fled to the United States, fearing it was a case of mistaken identity-his neighbor was the only other Nigerian in the building.
Chris's novels are GraceLand (FSG, 2004/Picador 2005) and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His poetry collections include Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He teaches in the MFA Program at Antioch University, Los Angeles and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside. A Middleton Fellow at the University of Southern California, he is the recipient of the 2001 PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the 2001 Prince Claus Award and a 2003 Lannan Literary Fellowship & the 2005 PEN Hemingway Book Prize.
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