Readings & Talks Featuring Chigozie Obioma

October 13, 2026 at 7:00PM ET

Location: Copley Formal Lounge

Join us for Reading and conversation with Booker Prize finalist, novelist, and author of The Road to the Country.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by October 6th to Patricia Guzman, 202-687-6294, pg654@georgetown.edu. A good faith effort will be made to fulfill requests made after October 6th.

Excerpt from The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma

For the first time in nearly an hour, Kunle rises from the cane chair and looks at his wristwatch, then at the small bush outside. The rain, which had started shortly before he sat to write, has stopped now. On the soft earth closer to the window, a small bird totters, a writhing red worm clasped in its beak. He feels again the presence, the unusual sense of something, a thing alive yet invisible, watching him. He glances up, then around himself. But there is no one.

He picks up the papers and begins to go through the “story” he has just written. At once he is surprised by how many of the details about the accident have remained in his mind, even after all these years. It was only this morning that he’d walked into the auditorium near the Law Building and heard a lecturer speak about writing to free oneself. He’d rushed home, picked up a pen and the foolscap notebook. And now, pieces of his childhood—blown in from remote corners of the past—are gathered in these few sheets of foolscap paper.

As he rereads, the details rise before his eyes in vivid colors: Nkechi, standing beside him, nine years old just like him. She wears on her face the beauty of youth; her hair is permed and ribboned, and her skin shiny with pomade.

“Darling, let us send Tunde outside, oh?” she says, leaning into his left ear. “Let him not disturb us.”

“Oh, okay,” he says.

Nkechi whispers something else to him, and abruptly he turns towards the door as Tunde, only six then, comes in swinging. Tunde tells them he wants stew, and rice, and goat meat. Kunle listens to his brother’s chatter with half his mind as Nkechi steps closer, cups her hand around his ear, and says, “Darling, send him away—o? Mmhuu . . . Send him away so that he will not disturb us again.”

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