Your winning short story was about a family of refugees negotiating their way, their lives as individuals and as a family in a new place with ways strange, unfamiliar and often harsh. What inspired this story? I ask this conscious that in the UK elections in 2005, the question of refugees, asylum seekers and immigration generally was an emotive one.
 
Well, I wrote the story several years ago and I’d been influenced by news reports of atrocities in various parts of Africa. I wanted to take the reports further, and make something very cruel and unacceptable more personal and familiar – the idea of a family undergoing difficulties and trying to overcome them. I think many people tend to view refugee families simply as refugees, without the complex lives we all live. I wasn’t really attempting to offer a different viewpoint for people – I simply wanted this family to tell me their story.
 
On winning the Caine Prize you were quoted as saying that the Prize money would buy you a year off work in order to write. How have you coped with the challenge of balancing the tension between needing to work and also needing to write?
 
Not so well – I have to drop the writing in order to work and I’ve found that very disruptive. I used to write in the mornings before going to full-time work, which is a better way to write, I’ve found, but the pace is very slow.
 
Your bio also says you used to work for the BBC. What was that like?  Particularly as the BBC and other Western media have often been accused of painting a particular “stereotyped” picture of Africa?
 
Well, the BBC has always been accused of being “hideously white” and that is very often the case. But in my last job there were three Nigerians and a West Indian in my office, which was very unusual in my experience and encouraging.
 
It’s true, the media does tend to focus on the negative aspects of Africa, but then the news in the West is very negative too. Listen to the Today programme in the morning on Radio 4 or open a newspaper and it isn’t going to cheer you up. I tend to skim the news websites for more interesting stories, such as the Nigerian woman at Oxford or Cambridge who is constructing the world’s most powerful telescope. I’ve asked other people about this and nobody seems to have heard this story, yet it’s important. If she’d been a cleaner and had broken the telescope accidentally then perhaps that would have made the headlines.
 
Did you consciously choose to work in a bookshop, where arguably you were immersed daily in a world of books? Or was it more of a distraction, seeing other people’s books being published and on the shelves?
 
No, it was a complete accident – the first job that came along, and I took it. Looking back it was such an important direction in which to move as I learned so much on the job just by being surrounded by books.
 
In what ways?
 
By picking up books I would never have looked at in the first place, discussing books with colleagues and customers, having access to the latest titles straight from publishers’ representatives etc. Even after I left bookselling, and now, just popping into a bookshop and browsing gives me fresh impetus to write.
 
When you write, whom are you writing for? What are you trying to say? Or do you just let the story tell itself?
 
I write for myself – I’d stop writing if I had to target an audience. And yes, the story tells itself.
 
What has your experience been as an immigrant writer in the UK? Do you accept that tag at all?
 
I never thought of myself as an immigrant, although I suppose that’s what I am. I was sent to school here and ended up staying, but there was never a choice for me to be here. I don’t go around thinking of myself as this kind of writer or that kind. I’m simply a writer.
 
But it goes much deeper than choice doesn’t it? There are people referred to as second and third generation immigrants who never made a choice to be in one place or the other but are nevertheless caught up between two cultures. Did you never feel this tension? Do you feel a sense of rootlessness then? The archetypal global citizen?
 
When I was a teenager I did experience a sense of rootlessness because I was never sure what would happen after A Levels and then after university. Would I return to Nigeria or try out the US? I never wanted to remain in the UK as I hadn’t come here by choice, and it was never home for me. But I did go to America after university and found it to be the most foreign place I had ever been to, considering all my travels. Now that sense of rootlessness has transformed into something more liberating.