By AiW Guest: Sanya Osha.
Maik Nwosu – a novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright and professor of English literary studies at the University of Denver, Colorado – is one of the more intriguing as well as enduring figures of contemporary Nigerian literature.
Although an extremely productive writer – his earlier creative works include the novels Invisible Chapters (1999), Alpha Song (2001), and A Gecko’s Farewell (2016), as well as the poetry collection, The Suns of Kush (1998), and the short story collection, Return to Algadez (1997) – he has, however, been quiet on this front for a while.
Thankfully, this has been broken, and three times over, in 2025: with the drama A Quintet for Dawn which was published in February; a poetry collection, Stanzas from the Underground, that came out in early March; and most recently, his latest novel, The Book of Everything (March 17th). On its release, I spoke with Nwosu about his writing and The Book of Everything.
To offer some background words, both to this recent novel and our conversation below, Nwosu is undoubtedly one of the most versatile among his generation of writers. He is an artist who has managed to make his mark without much of the fanfare, sensationalism or the gimmickry associated with other African authors whose careers blossomed post 9/11. That this accomplishment occurred without the seeming prerequisite approval of mainstream literary circles or international publishing muscle and marketing makes his work all the more appealing.
Additionally, Nwosu found his voice as a writer in particularly trying times in his native Nigeria. During the early 1990s, he was a senior journalist at the Lagos-based, now defunct The Sunday Magazine, or TSM for short, founded by the formidable Chris Anyanwu. Anyanwu, along with other journalists – notably, Kunle Ajibade, George Mbah, and Ben Charles-Obi – was arrested in 1995 on trumped up charges of treason after reporting on a plotted and failed coup against the nefarious General Sani Abacha regime, and faced life imprisonment, later reduced to fifteen-years under pressure from human rights groups. It was left to Nwosu and his team to keep afloat the TSM ship amid constant threats and excruciating uncertainty as the military regime’s henchmen sowed mayhem, carnage and death all over the country.
As social and intellectual life floundered under military dictatorship, the literary scene also lost much of its customary vigour. The goons of Abacha were both ruthless and relentless in bolstering the regime, and voices of dissent were extinguished either through incarceration, exile or extermination. Indeed after more than a decade of near silence, Nigerian letters began an almost unlikely resurgence, with the international recognition of diaspora authors – such as Helon Habila, who won the UK-based Caine Prize for African writing in 2001; or seen in the rising momentum of Chris Abani’s work in both poetry and prose through the early 2000s, a writer who had already gained infamy and jail time in Nigeria for supposedly prophesying a coup d’etat in literary form in the 1980s; there was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s extraordinary reinvigoration of the scene with the publication of her ground-breaking novel, Purple Hibiscus, in 2003; Sefi Atta, and the considerable international buzz around her novel, All Good Things Will Come in 2005; or Chika Unigwe, whose novel On Black Sisters’ Street (2007/2009) won the $100,000 NLNG Prize in 2012.
Eventually, Nwosu, too, was able to extricate himself from the debris and carnage caused by military rule when he re-located to Syracuse University in the US in 2002 for post-graduate studies under the mentorship and support of Michael Echeruo, a distinguished professor of literature. Notably, the 2016 novel, A Gecko’s Farewell – which tells the stories of displacement and migratory routes of three young people, from Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt, as they meet in the blogosphere, on a platform created by the Nigerian, Etiaba, for Africans to share their stories and community, ‘Gecko X’ – was Nwosu’s only publication of a sustained creative work after leaving Nigeria, that is, until the three book releases of 2025.
A sustained critical evaluation of the cultural lacuna in Nigeria created by military dictatorship still needs to be undertaken. A significant point of focus for such a study would be that generation of literary artists and young men whose routes and growth were impacted by the myopia and violence fostered on the ground under such rule, who were then caught up in the chasm between the stifling era and the guarded renaissance that followed after the return to democracy in 1999 – such as Obi Nwakanma, Bunmi Oyinsan, Sola Osofisan, Akin Adesokan, Uche Nduka, as well as others wedged in that awkward historical moment. Nwosu remains an important figure that wriggled out of this difficult vacuum, or emerged as a direct result of it.
It is also perhaps informative here to include the two seismic events that profoundly affected Nwosu’s generation of writers: namely, the annulment of the June 12 presidential elections in 1993 and the hanging of the Ogoni 9 two years later. Unquestionably, the country sank into a state of anomie from which it has never fully re-emerged. As a result of these pervasive crises, creatives began to betray the trust bestowed in them by the public, while others ostensibly became fully fledged political activists, with yet others succumbing to rank opportunism, sinking to dangerous doublespeak and sheer hypocrisy. Nwosu, it appears, simply protected himself from the generalised conflagration by writing; writing as a form of survival, duty and therapy. This view of writing as a means of bearing witness and as self-preservation in times of collective trauma is also an essential part of Nwosu’s art.
In The Book of Everything, Nwosu resumes his interrupted conversation with the beleaguered Nigerian nation in characteristically unflashy and clear prose. Partly composed during his fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS), South Africa, it begins with the story of Ile, a Nigerian university professor based in the US, who receives a voicemail from a man in South Africa stating that his grandfather who died forty-four years ago has a message for him.
Drawing on strains similar to animism or magical realism, we start with a conflation of life and the hereafter, the great beyond where re-vitalised spirits roam, roar and hold court, a major trope of African literature from Amos Tutuola to J P Clark Bekederemo. But nonetheless, Nwosu’s tone is mostly circumspect, his voice, mellowed and peppered by experience without the burden of undue cynicism or fire of riotous despair. Rather, his explicitly creative imaginary is infused with the wisdom of a nicely weathered elder as an even-tempered sophisticate. In the burgeoning age of Afropolitan jouissance, Nwosu resolutely remains a much-needed voice of temperance.
Understandably, the novel absorbs a great deal of Nwosu’s diasporic experience; in other words, we have a writing that is recognisably Nigerian, whilst contributing to a decidedly de-territorialised literature; efflorescent, celebratory, liberatory and often cathartic. The Book of Everything grapples with many of the defining features of Nigerian society: religious fanaticism, truncated modernity, the urban/rural dichotomy, and tussles between jarring individualism and sheepish social conformism. It is, once again, courageous ground, despite the numerous warts and discomforts belied by what it covers.
And indeed, with this latest work, Nwosu remains a sensitive and perceptive chronicler of the existential abyss looming between a state of militarised tyranny and a strikingly ambiguous post-military freedom…
Sanya Osha: You published your last novel years ago, in 2016. I take it you’ve been preoccupied with your work as an academic. In addition, you have followed a path trod by many other creative writers of your generation, transiting from journalism to academia. Can you speak about these transitions and the tensions or frustrations they have created in your literary journey?
Maik Nwosu: I was a journalist for 11-12 years in Nigeria, before I went to grad school in Syracuse, then took up a professorial appointment – first at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, later at the University of Denver in Colorado. There are different expectations in both professions. My editor used to say in those days that anyone who couldn’t meet a deadline, even an “impossible” deadline, wasn’t a journalist. That was the time when aspiring journalists were sometimes asked to go to a nearby street and come back within an hour with a publishable news story. It’s a bit of a surprise to me these days what we managed to accomplish with the limited time and resources that we had then. Some of that work would have been truly outstanding if we had more time or resources. The concern in the academy isn’t about meeting near-impossible deadlines but more about the profundity of insight that one’s scholarship offers. But journalism prepared me for the academy in this respect: I arrived in Syracuse with the ability to conduct extensive research, undaunted by any sort of deadline or volume of work. I was able to complete a rigorous doctoral program in three years. Both journalism and the academy have helped my work as a writer. Both have brought me into contact with all sorts of people and exposed me to a variety of situations, journalism more interestingly so. But they’ve also limited my concentration on my writing because both…