Author Chris Abani grew up around Lagos, "a Third World city in the best possible sense," reading Yeats and Baldwin and watching American TV. His first novel, written as a teenager, got him sent to prison. It would be the first of three times. This L.A. Times piece chronicles Abani's journey from Africa to immigrant London to East Los Angeles, where he still lives and writes:
At first he found L.A.'s centerless quality frustrating and isolating after London. But he has fond memories of "chickens crowing in the morning, mariachi bands playing … people pulling beautiful wooden donkeys down the street." And as he settled in, he realized that American culture, with its mix of ethnicities and classes, has always been impure, mongrel.
"And L.A.," he said, "is the perfect metaphor for all of this."
Abani, who is also a saxaphonist, told Scott Timberg he considers himself "an Igbo writer, a British writer, a black writer and a Los Angeles writer." His most recent novel is ""The Virgin of Flames," about an East L.A. muralist named Black. Ruben Martinez wrote the L.A. Times book review.