Chika Unigwe (pictured) was born in the city of Enugu in southern Nigeria but moved to Flanders 17 years ago after meeting the Flemish man who would become her husband. She’d already earned a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Nigeria in Nsukka and then, once here, she completed an MA at the University of Leuven. In 2004, she completed a PhD from the University of Leiden.

Before coming to Flanders, she had already written several volumes of poetry and educational material. Today, she has published three novels in Dutch, her second language, all of which have been translated into English. Her second novel, Fata Morgana (On Black Sisters’ Street), earned her a place earlier in the summer on the longlist for the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, locally known as the African Nobel Prize.

This biennial prize is given to the best literary work produced by an African author. The jury is composed of distinguished African intellectuals, seasoned writers and literary critics. Last week, the shortlist was announced and, although Unigwe wasn’t on it, the title on the longlist should gain the book even more exposure than it has already had.

A life-changing project

Unigwe, who now lives in Turnhout with her husband and four children, is no novice when it comes to awards. In 2003, she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing, and a year later, she won the BBC Short story Competition and a Commonwealth Short Story Competition award. “The importance of a prize such as the Wole Soyinka isn’t just the recognition,” Unigwe tells me. “It also gets your name out there because it’s such an important prize in Africa.”

Unigwe, 38, understands the significance of awards. “To really break through in the fiction market, you need a lot of contacts and exposure, which is why winning prizes can be a big deal – for a budding author especially. I met my agent, for example, by being on the shortlist of the Caine Prize.”

On Black Sisters’ Street is a novel about the lives of four Nigerian women who came to Europe in search of a better life but ultimately ended up working as prostitutes in the red light district of Antwerp. It was an important novel for Unigwe, both professionally and personally.

“I put so much time and effort into it,” she explains. “I also learned a lot about myself while doing the research in the red light district. In a sense, this novel has really changed me. On Black Sisters’ Street so much more than a book because it introduced me to so many people. It also gave me the opportunity to go to Nigeria to do anti-trafficking campaigns.”

New way of thinking

In Nigeria, Unigwe had a very conservative Catholic upbringing: “I used to love the song ‘Let’s Talk about Sex’ by Salt-n-Pepa,” she says, “and every time I wanted to sing along, I had to substitute ‘sex’ with ‘bread’. So I was constantly singing: ‘Let’s talk about bread, baby’.” When she arrived in Flanders, she found a whole different world. “It was a huge culture shock to see these girls casually sitting behind windows in their underwear; everything was out in the open,” she says. “When I heard that a lot of the girls in Antwerp were from Nigeria, I became interested in their back story. I then started writing a short story about prostitution, but I soon realised there was so much more to it. That’s when I started the research that lead up to On Black Sisters’ Street.”

Culture shocks aside, Unigwe also had to learn a new language – a language in which she would masterfully write all her novels. “It’s completely different,” she says, than writing in her mother tongue of English. “I started learning Dutch when I was 21, and it’s not just a language, it’s another way of thinking and of expressing yourself. I’m currently working on a book for Wablieft, which is a project that asks authors to write books for adult who’ve had a limited education, and I realised that I become a different sort of writer in Dutch.”

One of a kind

The language wasn’t the only thing Unigwe had to get accustomed to when she came to Flanders, a region that would continue to shape her as a person and as a writer. “My husband and I were staying with my mother-in-law when I had just arrived here,” she recalls, “and he woke me that first morning for breakfast. I told him I wasn’t hungry, but he said that it’s the custom to sit at the breakfast table together, whether you’re hungry or not. I was used to eating when I was hungry and not because it was ‘time’. The days are a lot more structured here, which kind of took some getting used to.”

Unigwe’s novels all have references to her Nigerian roots and mostly deal with identity and looking for one’s place in the world. All her novels have been released in English, and she has collaborated on the translations. She is the only migrant author in Flanders writing in Dutch whose novels have been translated into English.

“I’ve been lucky to have had a lot of press coverage abroad,” she says. “When On Black Sisters’ Street was released in the US last December, I got a review in the The New York Times as well as the Los Angeles Times, which is pretty big for a Belgian-Nigerian author because there are a lot of American authors that don’t even get in there.”

www.chikaunigwe.com