Say You're One of Them »

Uwem Akpan was born inIkot Akpan Eda in southern Nigeria. After studying philosophy and English at Creighton and Gonzaga universities, he studied theology for three years at theCatholic Universityof Eastern Africa. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003 and received his MFA in creative writing from theUniversity of Michiganin 2006. "My Parents' Bedroom," a story from hisshort story collection,Say You're One of Them, was one offive short storiesby African writers chosen as finalists for TheCaine Prizefor African Writing 2007.Say You're One of Themwon the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Africa Region) 2009 and PEN/Beyond Margins Award 2009, and was finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.In 2007, Akpan taught at a Jesuit college inHarare, Zimbabwe.Now he serves atChristthe King Church, Ilasamaja-Lagos,Nigeria.

Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.

In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader...

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

…[a] startling debut collection…[Akpan] fuses a knowledge of African poverty and strife with a conspicuously literary approach to storytelling, filtering tales of horror through the wide eyes of the young. In each of the tales in Say You're One of Them a protagonist's childlike innocence is ultimately savaged by the facts of African life.

An Ex-mas Feast     3
Fattening for Gabon     37
What Language Is That?     173
Luxurious Hearses     187
My Parents' Bedroom     323
Afterword     355
Acknowledgments     357