Award winning Chika Unigwe will be reading from her new novel On Black Sisters' Street, on Tuesday 1 December, at the University’s Centre of West African Studies.
Chika has won the BBC Short Story Competition, a Commonwealth Short Story Award for and a Flemish literary prize for "De Smaak van Sneeuw", her first short story written in Dutch. She was also shortlisted for the 2004 Caine Prize.
The author was the recipient of a 2007 Unesco-Aschberg fellowship for creative writing, and of a 2009 Rockefeller Foundation fellowship for creative writing.
On Black Sisters' Street (published by Jonathan Cape), is a tale of choices and displacement set against the backdrop of the Antwerp prostitution scene.
Her first novel, De Feniks, was published in Dutch by Meulenhoff / Manteau in September 2005, and it is the first book of fiction written by a Flemish author of African origin. The story, set in Turnhout, explores grief, illness and loneliness, subjects already touched upon in Unigwe’s earlier work.
The reading will take place at 5.10pm, in the Danford Room, Second Floor of the Arts Building.
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For further information contact: Anietie Isong, International Press Officer, University of Birmingham, Tel: +44 (0) 1214147863. E-mail: a.isong@bham.ac.uk