Born on the 16 November 1962 in southeastern Nigeria, Uzoatu shares the same birthday with renowned author Chinua Achebe and the country’s first President Nnamdi Azikiwe. But remembers experiencing a peripatetic childhood, spending each class in primary school in a new town as his parents went through several transfers. The experienced fanned his imagination and in the company of his elder brother Maxim, he inevitably fell in love with books as he found fellow feeling with many writers.
At the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, he majored in the history of African Christianity at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, using the knowledge to fuel his creative writing. As a journalist in Lagos in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he excelled with his reviews, interviews and articles, many of which appeared in Crown Prince , a pioneer male magazine of which he was a staff member, and Mister magazine, which he also edited.
Subsequently, Uzoatu retired to a daytime job of managing a business in the southeastern Nigerian city of Onitsha and full-time writing. Vision Impossible, his first novel, but there are many manuscripts of poetry and prose in the pipeline. He is married with children.
Vision Impossible
In Vision Impossible Isidore Emeka Uzoatu captures the climate of fear that envelops an African nation in the iron grip of military dictatorship. Junior Obodo, on the wings of love and fresh out of university, takes the battle to the junta with the one weapon it seemed to detest most: the pen.
Of course, like all suspected of standing in the way, Junior is crushed – but not quite. There is a sublime touch to Uzoatu’s prose as the story soars with its hero beyond the stratosphere, transcending mortal existence to outline a new vision of a better society. It is a powerful allegory of the Nigerian condition.
Read excerpts….
The New Gong 