A Voice That Fought to Come Out

-- from "Beasts of No Nation"

The Potomac house is a brick Colonial on two partially wooded acres. It's got a swimming pool and a three-car garage, though it's modest by the standards of the neighborhood. The house has been "lived in, and lived in thoroughly," Iweala has written in a personal essay he's working on, and he goes on to mention the international art with which his mother has filled its rooms and the good times he's had scarfing pizza with friends during basement sleepovers.

Yet his parents told him "always to think of himself as Nigerian first." And the Potomac house has never felt entirely like home.

He's in the living room now, just back from spending time in Nigeria, where he's been working with refugees and where his mother became the finance minister a couple of years ago. Soft-spoken and polite, he seems not yet used to the attention he's started getting. Last summer, in London, his agent introduced him to a bearded man sitting in the office. "Uzo, meet Salman," Iweala remembers her saying, "and I was like -- no."

"He's ridiculously young," Salman Rushdie later told Dave Weich of Powells.com. But reading Iweala's book was "one of those rare occasions when you see a first novel and you think: This guy is going to be very, very good."

This was not the impression Patricia Powell got when he first signed up for her Harvard creative writing class.

"He was awful," says Powell, a novelist now teaching at the University of Houston. "He wrote this stream-of-consciousness fiction, and no one in the class knew what to do with it." But what was great about him, she says, "is that he wanted to write so badly .

"He knew he had something to say, and the language was coming."

Home for Thanksgiving of junior year, right after his encounter with Keitetsi, he started writing furiously. "Just write, write, write, and this huge story came out of it," he says. He didn't have the voice right yet, but the story was good enough for him to submit when he applied, later that year, to write a "creative" senior thesis.

Kincaid read his submission and decided he had talent. They met every week. She gave him the key to her office so he could work there on weekends.