Stephen Buoro on How A Clockwork Orange Shook His World

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Stephen Buoro about his debut novel, The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: So, you said you heard the voice of your character very loud and clear in your head one day. What do you think predicated this loud voice coming to you and had you ever had that happen before?

Stephen Buoro: Yeah, I mean as I came of age, and as I read more books, and as I related really strongly to me some writers who have like, very strong distinctive voices. And like, for example, some of the things I examine in my novel is the theme of coming of age and the search for identity, who my character really is in this post-colonial whirlpool, post-colonial nation. One of the books I read in my early 20s that shook my world a bit was this book A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

So, I mean, I remember reading the book, I actually read an eBook version of it on my phone. And it was really crazy. So, I was like, wow, so, you could write a book like this, I mean, a book that could be so irreverent and the reality of all these characters, I mean, of a young boy, a teenage boy. The voice at the beginning of A Clockwork Orange, the voice has convinced so much rage, angst, anger and all that, which I find very fascinating and very revealing.

Because up to date all the books I had been reading were the books with more process of reckoning, it was more literary, and the boys weren’t so streetwise. These characters that I’m fascinated with, or like my own personal experience of coming of age, of being a young boy and all that I also loved to read The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.

So the voice just like opened up my own search for identity, like my roots where I came from, the streets where I grew up, the conversations I had with my friends, like all this complicated dynamic of post-colonialism and so all the stuff and the voice gave me this modality, these roots to open up all these complications of a boy growing up in contemporary Nigeria.

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Stephen Buoro was born in Nigeria in 1993. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where he received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship. He lives in Norwich, United Kingdom. The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa is his first novel.