Chigozie Obioma — Emerging Voices 2015 fiction winner

Few debut novels generated more excitement this year than Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen. Published to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, the winner of the inaugural Emerging Voices prize for African and Middle Eastern fiction has also reached the later stages of four other literary awards, Britain’s Man Booker shortlist included, and even prompted the New York Times to hail its 28-year-old Nigerian author as the heir to Chinua Achebe.

When I meet him on the fringes of the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August, the softly spoken Obioma plays down comparisons between The Fishermen and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). “The truth is this: I see myself first as an Igbo man,” he says, referring to the Nigerian ethnic group. “Achebe was the first who really attempted to tell our story to the world, and it is nearly impossible not to have been influenced by that.”

But the Nigerian novel that looms largest for Obioma is Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), a journey into the land of the dead that draws deeply on a well of folk-tale and legend.

“That mythic dimension is what I’m most interested in — the way he blends the supernatural world seamlessly with the human reality.”

The Fishermen is the story of four brothers who, taking advantage of their disciplinarian father’s absence, defy his warnings and fish in the Omi-Ala, a once-sacred river now shunned as a place of danger and pollution. They encounter a madman, Abulu, and learn of his prophecy that the eldest, Ikenna, will die at the hands of one of the others. The idea planted, trust breaks down and the boys are pulled inexorably apart.

Obioma explains how the novel was inspired by a telephone conversation with his father in 2009. Living abroad and nostalgic for home, he was told of the increasing closeness of his elder brothers, who had been bitter rivals for a period during adolescence. “I started thinking about what could have happened if they had continued on that path,” he says. “So I decided to tell a story about a family whose unity is destroyed by an external force.”

Nowhere is the mythic quality of The Fishermen felt more than in its signature device: the vivid images, often drawn from the natural world, through which its narrator recalls his childhood. “Father was an eagle,” runs one. “The mighty bird that planted his nest high above the rest of his peers, hovering and watching over his young eagles, the way a king guards his throne.”

Yet this is also a novel rooted in a specific time and place. The brothers play Mortal Kombat; they are swept up in the optimism of MKO Abiola’s 1993 presidential campaign; later, they marvel around crowded television screens at the progress of Nigeria’s footballers at the Atlanta Olympics. And in the margins of the narrative, details offered almost in passing — a body found by the river, a thief burnt in the market — create an impression of social breakdown that seems to invite a realist reading of the boys’ response to Abulu’s curse.