Chika unigwe biography sample
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Amarachika Unigwe is a Nigerian-born writer who writes in English and Dutch.
Early Life and Education
She was born in Enugu in 1974. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a Master of Art from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She also has a PhD in Literature from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Her thesis, entitled “In the Shadow of Ala; Igbo Women Writing as an Act of Righting,” was completed in 2004.
Career
Unigwe, who was inspired by the works of Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta, first made her mark as a novelist in September 2005 with De Feniks (The Phoenix), which was published in Dutch by Meulenhoff/Manteau (of Amsterdam and Antwerp). It was the first book of fiction written by a Flemish author of African origin and was shortlisted for the Vrouw en Kultuur debuutprijs (‘Women and Culture Debut Prize’) for the best first no
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Biography:
Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and now lives in Turnhout, Belgium, with her husband and four children.
She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and an MA from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She also holds a PhD from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands.
Chika Unigwe is the author of fiction, poetry, articles and educational material. She won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition for her story “Borrowed Smile”, a Commonwealth Short Story Award for “Weathered Smiles” and a Flemish literary prize for “De Smaak van Sneeuw”, her first short story written in Dutch. “The Secret”, another of her short pieces, was nominated for the 2004 Caine Prize. She was the recipient of a 2007 Unesco-Aschberg fellowship for creative writing, and of a 2009 Rockefeller Foundation fellowship for creative writing.
Her first novel, De Feniks, was published in Dutch by
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Chika Unigwe: Biographical Fiction and the Creation of Possible Lives
Related papers
Ian Finseth
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 2002
effects, departures and returns, and so forth. On a larger scale, involving more, and more complex, configurations of experience, narrative provides a sense of the coherence of the life, of the overarching story and subsidiary stories that people continually tell themselves and others about who they are, what they are doing, where they have been. Such routine autobiographical reflection, or what Heidegger termed Besinnung, a making sense of things, is for Heidegger the essence and prerequisite of self-authorship and underlies the "authenticity," or radical uniqueness, of a life. Carr makes two particularly betydelsefull points. First, he describes the heightened importance of autobiographical stocktaking during or after periods of