Uchenna Onyishi is a Nigerian writer, filmmaker, photographer, and multidisciplinary artist. His work explores memory, grief, intimacy, shame, and the fragile bonds that shape human lives. Born in Enugu, Nigeria, and raised between Nigeria and China, his experience moving between cultures continues to inform the psychological and moral landscapes of his fiction and visual art.
At thirteen, he received an award for an essay on child trafficking presented by Nigeria’s First Lady at the Muhammadu Buhari Convention Center. He did not return to writing until 2020, when a series of fictional letters inspired by Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena helped him rediscover his voice and begin examining the inherited expectations, obligations, and narratives that shaped his identity.
Drawing from Nigerian, Japanese, and Russian literary traditions, Onyishi writes fiction marked by psychological depth, emotional restraint, and an interest in the quiet tensions between duty and self-determination. His work has been influenced by Leo Tolstoy, James Baldwin, Haruki Murakami, Osamu Dazai, Natsume Sōseki, Toni Morrison, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Before turning fully to fiction, Onyishi spent a decade as a creative director and filmmaker, co-founding a boutique creative agency whose clients included Sony Music, VICE World News, and iQIYI. Alongside his literary practice, he maintains an active photography practice exploring stillness, geometry, shadow, and form.
Onyishi holds a BSc, an MBA, and a PhD in Economics from the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. In 2025, after fifteen years in China, he relocated to New York to pursue an MFA in Fiction at Columbia University.
He is currently at work on his debut novel.
It follows a Nigerian Beijinger whose search for love is haunted by the shame of a childhood he has hidden from his mother.
Spanning three decades and three countries, the novel begins in Nsukka, Nigeria, in the 1990s before following his family’s move to Abuja in the early 2000s and their eventual relocation to Beijing following the death of Nigeria’s president. There, he learns Mandarin, falls in love, and gradually constructs a second identity. As the years pass, he struggles to reconcile the pressures of his cultural otherness, his father’s expectations, and the immaculate image his mother demands with a profound sense of shame and a desire to be fully known.
At its heart, the novel asks what becomes of a man who cannot forgive himself, who believes he has become unworthy of love.
The novel explores politics, faith, love, shame, identity, the loss of childhood innocence, and the enduring consequences of childhood trauma.
UCHENNA ONYISHI 