Uzodinma Iweala
Uzodinma Iweala was born in Washington, D.C., to Nigerian parents and grew up between the United States and Nigeria, in a family for whom home meant two places at once. He studied English and American literature at Harvard, where his senior thesis became Beasts of No Nation (2005), a novel narrated by a child soldier in an unnamed West African country. The book won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and in 2015 became Netflix’s first original feature film, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and starring Idris Elba, whose performance won a Screen Actors Guild Award. Granta, the British literary magazine, named him one of its Best of Young American Novelists in 2007, a list it draws up once a decade.
Iweala trained as a physician at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and turned that training toward Our Kind of People (2012), an account of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria told through the people living with it rather than the statistics. His second novel, Speak No Evil (2018), follows a first-generation Nigerian-American teenager in Washington and the distance between what a family expects of a son and who he is.
Iweala’s stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, Vanity Fair, the Financial Times and Foreign Affairs. He is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
A common theme of Iweala’s work is an attention to lives lived between places and identities: who a person is to their family, their country and themselves, and how those answers shift by choice or by force, in a world of constant political, social, and cultural flux.
From 2018 to 2024 Iweala was chief executive of The Africa Center in New York, leading the institution through a financial turnaround and the building of its home at the top of Museum Mile, with a program that brought heads of state, artists and writers into conversation about Africa and its diaspora. Earlier, in Lagos, Iweala co-founded Ventures Africa, a pan-African media platform, and was the founding chief executive of the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria.
Iweala has taught fiction and nonfiction as writer in residence in New York University’s Creative Writing Program, and is a fellow of the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University and a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow at UNESCO in Paris. He serves on the boards of the International Rescue Committee, the World Wildlife Fund and the International Center of Photography. His film work includes executive producing Beasts of No Nation and producing the documentaries Waiting for Hassana, an official selection at Sundance, and Oil in Our Creeks for Al Jazeera.
Iweala lives in Heidelberg, Germany.
United States of Ambivalence, his first collection of essays, will be published by Harper on January 5, 2027.
Books
- United States of Ambivalence: EssaysHarper, 2027
- Speak No EvilHarper, 2018
- Our Kind of People: A Continent’s Challenge, A Country’s HopeHarper, 2012
- Beasts of No NationHarper, 2005
Selected writing
- “Sleep,” a short storyThe New York Times Magazine, 2020
- White Signs at Black ProtestsVanity Fair, 2020
- Nigeria’s Second IndependenceForeign Affairs, 2022
- How my city changed its coloursThe Guardian, 2016
- Stop Trying to “Save” AfricaThe Washington Post, 2007
- Dance CadaverousGranta, 2007
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