One to watch London-based Chibundu Onuzo is a 19-year-old Nigerian undergraduate student who recently signed a two-novel deal with the British publisher Faber, making her its youngest ever woman author. Chibundu Onuzo, a history student at King’s College London, will have her first novel, “The Spider King’s Daughter,” published next year. This novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between a male street hawker and an ajebota girl whose father is a member of the country’s ‘corrupt elite’. Onuzo is the latest of a new generation of talented young Nigerian writers — many of them female — who have made their mark in the literary world in the past few years. They include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction for “Half of A Yellow Sun”; Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani who published her first novel, “I Do Not Come To You By Chance,” last year, which has also garnered several awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and Chika Unigwe , an Afro-Belgian aut...
ACCLAIMING PEOPLE OF IGBO DESCENT