A Voice That Fought to Come Out

"It was as if it had been written by an old man."

This darkness is so full like it is my mother's hug. Heya! I am remembering my mother and how she is so good to me that each time she is hugging me that is all I am needing to see the dark skin of her arm holding me close to her and I am knowing that the life I am living is so good.

So what comes next if you're a 23-year-old writer whose first effort has already been called "an extraordinary book" (the Sunday Telegraph), "an astonishing debut" (Kirkus Reviews) and "a work of visceral urgency" that "heralds the arrival of a major talent" (novelist Amitav Ghosh)?

"He's so mild-mannered and soft-spoken," says Boston University's Betancourt, "that you wouldn't know the fierce passion and talent he carries around." He could, she says, "take his life in any direction he wants to."

Not long after graduation, Iweala headed for Nigeria to work with refugees displaced by Muslim-Christian conflict in the north. He can see himself doing international development work, he says. He's also applying to medical schools.

"There are a lot of directions I guess I can go in right now," he says. "I guess that's the beauty of this situation."

And yet . . .

He was writing, writing, writing, every day he was in Nigeria, trying to capture what he saw.

"Somebody would tell me something and then: 'Oh, okay, story idea,' " he says. He'd start stories but not finish them, just getting things down so he could revisit them later, write them in some other form.

"I think he has notebooks and notebooks," Kincaid says. "He writes e-mails from Africa which will take me an hour to read."

Does she think he'll keep writing, then? Medical school or no?

"Oh, if he doesn't I'll be so heartbroken," she says.