Contrasting images of his native Nigeria in Nnamdi Ehirin's debut novel, The Prince of Monkeys
In April's Stories from the 55 podcast, Laura Angela Bagnetto speaks to Nnamdi Ehirin from Nigeria about a coming-of-age story called The Prince of Monkeys. The author also reads an extract from his work.
The Prince of Monkeys unites politics and religion through a first-person narration. It's a story weaving in and out of the bonds between four old friends. It contains hints of autobiographical writing, embodied in close observations of Nnamdi Ehirin's own culture at the end of the 20th Century.
Of his main character, he says, "The narrator is passive and deliberately so. It's not particularly autobiographical though. When I was growing up I was not the most vocal and I always open to ideas from other people in the group, open to trying out new things. It's not being passive, as being weak. He's open to others' ideas."
Also, one of Laura Angela Bagnetto's guests in 2018, Sulaiman Addonia who wrote Silence of My Mother Tongue, shares his favourite novel in the Heinneman African Book series called Season of Migration to the North by Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih.
He says, "It taught me that for a writer there shouldn't be any forbidden place ... Tayeb Salih taught me about the freedom of writing."
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