I set out to write about family and the way they served as a homophobic anchor tethering queer people to the bare floor, to write about friendship, to write about class, about the fights we wage against ourselves, and about how queerphobic violence follows us from childhood, before we are even able to name it or defend ourselves. “I wouldn’t say my vision for the book changed,” he says. During revisions, he wrote more chapters because the story didn’t feel complete. The 23-year-old award-winning writer and queer rights activist told Open Country Mag that he wrote the first draft in a few months. The imprint described it “a passionate love story about two young men who may have too far a distance to bridge to another.” It is slated for publication in June 2023, alongside two other titles. Then last month, it was selected by Roxane Gay for her Grove Atlantic imprint Roxane Gay Books. Last year, the manuscript, And Then He Sang a Lullaby, won the James Currey Prize. He invested a lot of emotional work, because he believed that his story should be out there. He would come home from work, handle chores, and then open his notebook. When the Nigerian writer Ani Kayode Somtochukwu started his novel manuscript in 2018, he did not have a laptop and was working an unpaid internship in Port Harcourt.
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