Chigozie Obioma was born in 1986 in Nigeria, and lived in Cyprus and Turkey. Today he lives in America where he works as a professor of literature and creative writing. He is the recipient of the Hopwood Award for Fiction and Poetry, and his work has been published in Virginia Quarterly Review and Transition. For his novel Fishermen, he received the "Oppenheimer" award and was a finalist for the "Man Booker".

The New York Times Sunday Book Review included the novel Fisherman as an Editor's Choice, the American Library Association named it one of the five best novels of spring 2015, Publishers Weekly Book of the Week, and Kirkus Review's included it in the list of "10 Novels to Lose Yourself In". He also wrote the short stories Fishermen (2011) and The Great Convert (2014), the essay Audacity of Prose (2015) and the collection of poems The Road To the Country (2015).