Upon graduating, Emezi worked in the non-profit sector for two years while pursuing writing grants. Emezi dropped out and began pursuing a Master’s degree in Public Administration at New York University. When Emezi moved to the United States at age 16 to begin post-secondary education, they studied Biology due to pressures from family members and later enrolled in veterinary school at Tufts University where the rigor of their program began having a negative effect on their mental health. Emezi proclaimed their desire to be a writer at age seven. Emezi says they were often treated as a foreigner because of their mother’s Malaysian nationality despite the fact that they were born and raised in Nigeria.Įmezi recalls a Black educator from Ohio (one of the Niger Wives) who worked at their primary school in Nigeria and encouraged them to write from a very young age. They were raised as part of a very tight-knit immigrant community known as the Niger Wives, an organization of non-Nigerian women married to Nigerians. Emezi has been very open with the public about having a double mastectomy and hysterectomy in order to feel more at ease with their lack of gender.Įmezi was born in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigeria by an Igbo father and a Tamil mother. Emezi is also an ogbanje which refers to an Igbo cosmological idea of a spirit who is born to die, and who usually takes a human form for only a short period of time. They refer to themselves as “they” rather than “he” or “she” to recognize their gender identity. Transgender people do not identify with the gender assigned to them. Emezi identifies as transgender and as an ogbanje. Akwaeke Emezi is part of a small but growing number of transgender Nigerian writers whose unique perspective and the rapidly growing audience for their novels have garnered them international literary acclaim.

Akwaeke emezi books