Tochi Onyebuchi

Tochi Onyebuchi (born October 4, 1987) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer and former civil rights lawyer. His 2020 novella Riot Baby received an Alex Award from the American Library Association, the Ignyte Award for Best Novella, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 2021. He is known for incorporating civil rights and Afrofuturism into his stories and novels.

Early life and education

Onyebuchi was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States. His parents were Nigerian Igbo immigrants Elizabeth Ihuegbu and Nnamdi Onyebuchi, who was a restaurant manager. His first name means "praise God" in Igbo.

His family lived in New Britain, Connecticut, until 1998, when his father died at the age of 39. His family then moved to Newington, Connecticut, to a mostly white neighborhood. He attended the Choate Rosemary Hall school in Wallingford, Connecticut.

He says: "Growing up as the son of Nigerian immigrants, I always felt like I was in a position where I didn't completely identify as an African-American; I can trace my family eight generations back, but I'm not fully Nigerian, because I was born in America. I operate in that sort of in-between space."

As a youth, Onyebuchi was an avid reader and was strongly influenced by X-Men comics, especially the character of Black Panther. While he appreciated works by black authors he was required to read in high school, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, Invisible Man and Native Son, he preferred adventure and science fiction stories. His favorite book was the manga series Blade of the Immortal.

In high school, he studied abroad for a year in France, where he fell in love with Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, and was inspired when he learned Dumas was of African ancestry. Onyebuchi wrote extensively growing up and attempted to sell his first novel in high school.

In 2009, he earned a Bachelor's degree in political science from Yale University, where he was a member of the fraternity of St. Anthony Hall. He also spent a summer in Morocco learning Arabic.

He later earned his Master of Fine Arts in screenwriting from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. While getting his MFA, he worked as a digital media intern for Marvel Comics.

Onyebuchi also received a Master's degree in Global Economic Law from Instituts d'études politiques in France. In 2015, he received his Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School. There, he "got woke" about the differences between the lives of white and black Americans.

Career

After law school, Onyebuchi was licensed with the New York Bar and began a career in civil rights law. He worked in the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State Attorney General's Office and was also an investigator for New York City's Legal Aid Society where he assisted prisoners from Rikers Island. He said, "This brought me to the edge of burnout. I wanted to remain involved in those issues, but away from the constant grind. I realized I didn't have the stamina for it."

From 2017 to 2019, he worked at a high-tech firm as a domain expert. He would use his two-hour daily commute on the train as time to write. In 2019, he left his job to devote his time to writing.

Novels and stories

Onyebuchi began writing novels and submitting them to publishers when he was in high school. When his first 16 novels were rejected, he decided to move on to a new project rather than to edit and resubmit. Because of this process, he had written 17 novels in 15 years. About a year after law school, he signed a contract to write two young adult novels.

His first published novel, Beasts Made of Night (2017), was written for young adult readers and is set in a mythical dystopian world inspired by Nigerian folklore. School Library Journal wrote: "Onyebuchi's world-building is strong, and the details leap off the page; readers will witness the poverty, smell the delicious food, and feel the physical pain of being a sin-eater." Time wrote: "This balancing act of thrill and inquiry promises to make the 33-year-old Onyebuchi a power player in the YA world in the years to come." Beast of Night won the 2018 Ilube Nommo Award for Novel by an African. He published a sequel, Crown of Thunder, in 2018.

He then wrote the War Girls young adult series, which includes War Girls in 2019 and Rebel Sisters in 2020. The setting for War Girls is Nigeria of 2172, but using historical events such as the Biafran War. School Library Journal wrote that War Girls was "A bleak but compulsively readable story with high action and high drama in equal measure".

In 2020, he published Riot Baby, revolving around Kev, born during the 1992 Los Angeles riots and his sister who possesses telekinetic powers. Onyebuchi drew on his experience as a lawyer in setting much of the novel at Rikers Island in New York, where Kev is wrongfully incarcerated. His inspiration for the novel came from the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin and the lack of indictments of the police officers who killed them. He says, "I felt a rage born of impotence. At the same time, as a writer, I clung to this idea of writers as alchemists—that we can take pain and anger and rage and sorrow and turn it into a work of art that will alleviate this crippling sense of loneliness." Riot Baby won the Alex Award for young adult fiction from the American Library Association, the Ignyte Award for best novella, and the World Fantasy Award for best novella. Riot Baby was also a finalist for the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novella.