“In the absence of compassion, something really nefarious grows. And that thing is really hard to bottle up, it seeps back into the culture, often as violence. We have this hope in America that we can build a wall and shove things we hate behind it. But that doesn’t work. We don’t get to hide a poison in this one little hole, it grows out everywhere. Because it’s people who are poisonous. That uncaring, ‘wealth over everything’ kind of thinking was emboldened under Donald Trump, but it has existed forever. It’s as American as America.”
Speaking on the phone from a hotel room in Manchester, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah– a provocative and inventive set of dystopian stories about white misperceptions and racially aggravated injustice – created a stir in the literary world, and Barack Obama singled out the Ghanaian New York writer for his originality and chutzpah. was The Big Issue 2018 book of the year; five years later he has published his debut novel,. Now 31, he’s no longer a mid-twenties firebrand rookie, but his punch is as powerful as ever, and his passion remains undiminished.
