Fiction: Borderlines (2009): Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

by Uwem Akpan, Veronique de Turenne (Narrator), Thrity Umrigar

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has become the largest and most prestigious book festival in the country, attracting more than 130,000 book lovers each year. Veronique de Turenne is a published playwright, journalist, and essayist, and was the book critic for the NPR's news show Day to Day. She has written for Salon and Variety and wrote the L.A. Now blog for the Los Angeles Times. Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian-born Jesuit priest, became a fiction writer during his seminary days. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Say You're One of Them, which is a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in First Fiction. Thrity Umrigar, the author of four books, has written for national newspapers, including the Washington Post, and contributes regularly to the Boston Globe. She is an associate professor of English at Case Western University. Her latest novel is The Weight of Heaven. Luis Alberto Urrea's books include The Hummingbird's Daughter, The Devil's Highway, and most recently Into the Beautiful North. Urrea is a recipient of the American Book Award and several other honors.

Audible Audio

Published September 22, 2009

About the author

Uwem Akpan was born in Ikot Akpan Eda in the Niger Delta in Nigeria. Uwem’s short stories and autobiographical pieces have appeared in the special editions of The New Yorker, the Oprah magazine, Hekima Review, the Nigerian Guardian, America, etc.
His first book, Say You’re One of Them, was published in 2008 by Little, Brown, after a protracted auction. It made the “Best of the Year” list at People magazine, Wall Street Journal, and other places. The New York Times made it the Editor’s Choice, and Entertainment Weekly listed it at # 27 in their Best of the Decade. Say You’re One of Them won the Commonwealth Prize (Africa Region), the Open Book Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. The collection of short stories was the 2009 Oprah Book Club selection. A New York Times and Wall Street Journal #1 bestseller, it has been translated into 12 languages.
His second book and first novel, New York, My Village, will be published in Nov 2021 by WW Norton. In this immigrant story, Uwem writes about NYC with the same promise and pain we saw in his African cities of Say You’re One of Them. “New York City has always mystified me since I first spent two weeks in the Bronx in 1993,” he says. “It was only when I lived in Manhattan in 2013 that I began to understand the metro system, to visit the different neighborhoods, to enjoy the endless ethnic dishes. It didn’t also take long before I discovered the city’s crazy underbelly.”
Uwem teaches in the University of Florida’s MFA Program.