Hello again Chika. I am springing this conversation on you as a surprise. Hopefully you will want to chat with me. Now is the time to confess that apart from your "Mundane Poems" which appear in the March 2003 issue of Sentinel Poetry, and some of your newspaper articles, I have not read very much of your work. On the run up to this conversation, I spent the last few days searching unsuccessfully for your book  "Teardrops" here in London. It is therefore unlikely that I will cite your work too much. For me, this is a journey of discovery - to discover Chika Unigwe; one of the splendid African voices writing in English today. Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Chika Unigwe

I was born in Enugu, Nigeria, the sixth of seven children. I went to primary school at Enugu (Ekulu and WTC) and went to high school at Federal Government Girls College, Abuja. I hold a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Nigeria and did my post-graduate studies at the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven (Belgium). I am presently a doctoral student at the University of Leiden in Holland. I live in Turnhout, Belgium with my husband and three children.

Isn't that a tough one? How do you strike a balance between the demands of life as a wife, mother and writer?

It is tough but I am a determined person. And it helps that both my mother and my mother-in-law help out very often.

In what section of a bookstore would you feel more comfortable to have your books displayed - feminist, womanist, or contemporary African? How have you anchored your writing within your preferred category in terms of your themes and the way you treat them?

Contemporary African, only because it does not sound as restrictive as the other terms. However, I must confess that in my recent writing, (fiction in particular), I have tended to write women's stories. I write about African women and their particular experiences as wives, mistresses, mothers, mothers-in-law in their societies and as the "other" in exile.

I don't understand what you mean by the "other" in exile. Other what?

"other" as in: non-native, non-male. This "otherness" plays a vital role in the decisions they take to survive in their new environment.