Just over three years ago, shortly after the Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma had published his debut novel, The Fishermen, he wrote an essay entitled “The Audacity of Prose”. In it, he railed against the “blind adoption” of “minimalism” in contemporary fiction. Novelists should not aspire to mere reportage, he argued; they should aim for an artistic clarity “that is the equivalence of special effects in film”. He applauded authors as various as Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie and especially Arundhati Roy, who “float enthusiastically on blasted chariots of prose, and whose literary horses are high on poetic steroids”.
At the time, Obioma was 29. The Fishermen, a mythic and bloody tale of three brothers in 1990s Nigeria, went on to be shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and Obioma was described by one critic as “the heir to Chinua Achebe”.
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