Akwaeke Emezi is a writer particularly known for their award-winning book Freshwater. In addition to their writing career, Emezi created a project The Unblinding.
Background
Ethnicity:
Akwaeke Emezi's mother is Malaysian, father is Nigerian.
Akwaeke Emezi was born on June 6, 1987, in Umuahia, Abia, Nigeria. They were raised Catholic and have two siblings. Emezi started reading and writing at five years. By seven years old, they read through all of the books in their parent’s house.
Education
Akwaeke Emezi received a Master of Public Administration degree in international public policy and nonprofit management from New York University in 2012. They moved to Boston to attend Tufts University for veterinary medicine in 2013 but soon realized the field wasn’t for them. After leaving the veterinary field behind, they applied to the Master of Fine Arts program at Syracuse University. In two semesters, Emezi wrote what became their debut novel Freshwater. In 2016 they received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing.
Career
Emezi’s short prose work was first published in magazines such as Specter Magazine, Sable Literary Magazine, and Wasafiri Magazine. In 2015 they wrote the text about origin Who Will Claim You?. Their writing has been published by T Magazine, Dazed Magazine, The Cut, Buzzfeed, Granta Online, Vogue.com, and Commonwealth Writers, among others.
Their debut Freshwater was published in 2018. In the book, a Nigerian baby, Ada, enters the world with a miasma of spirits inside her head. Based on personal experience and with stylistic elegance and poetic, unsettling imagery, Emezi explores a type of mental confusion that plagues the protagonist into adulthood and poses questions about the secrets of existence and the self. The result is the postulation that one must ultimately live with one’s demons without surrendering oneself to them, and that one must - in a playful way - situate oneself along the borders between genders, between life and death, and between God and individual. The book is developed into a series for FX.
Akwaeke Emezi has also been working on video art since 2014. One of their first, Ududeagu, is a contemporary visual folktale rooted in concepts of loss, leaving, and loneliness. It follows a cultural pattern of intergenerational storytelling and also functions as a gendered self-portrait in which the subject’s male body becomes a proxy for their own. Originally written in English, Emezi collaborated with their father to translate the narration into Igbo and narrated it themselves as an exercise in engaging with the lost fluency of their language.
Their first novel is Pet (2019). In the young adult debut, Akwaeke Emezi asks difficult questions about what choices a young person can make when the adults around are in denial. Their sophomore adult novel, The Death of Vivek Oji, is forthcoming in 2020.
Views
Toni Morrison, Helen Oyeyemi, Fran Ross, Nora K. Jemisin, Zen Cho, Eloghosa Osunde and Christopher Myers have inspired Akwaeke Emezi's writing. For them, reading and writing always went hand in hand.
Quotations:
"I think everyone's centered in their own reality, you know. I think part of the thing that's a problem, really, in the world today is this inability to acknowledge multiple realities, and this insistence that there has to be one dominant reality, and everything that falls outside that reality is false and untrue."
"I’ve learned to build a bubble around myself, one that protects me as much as it can from the violence of being embodied in a world like this, to have people in it who are like me, who understand how important tenderness is to staying alive."
"I consider writing my major path, so I’ll go with that one. I think I’m passionate about it because it’s something I’ve loved for so long, and now I get to do it for a living, to challenge myself at my craft and really find out how good I can get at it."
"My friends and family know I’m not a woman - I’ve told them - but some continue to think of me as one anyway."
Personality
Akwaeke Emezi is a non-binary trans person and has chosen the pronoun 'they' to speak about the personality.
They're a control freak and a planner, so they love mapping things. They love that they can control all their outcomes.
They're very much about solitude. They don’t like writing around people or with people. They can’t even write in cafes because there are too many other people. They always have to write at home with no one else around. It’s very distracting for them.
They have survived a suicide attempt.
Quotes from others about the person
"The author Akwaeke Emezi is a tsunami of artistry. Their talent, creativity and sharp insights create writing that carries readers on a wave of inspiration. They’re not an angel, but this brilliant writer is truly a deity." - Glendon Francis
"We are so lucky to be living at the same time that Akwaeke Emezi is making work." - Fran Tirado
"Akwaeke Emezi is a major, exhilarating talent." - NoViolet Bulawayo