Jekwu Anyaegbuna is a Nigerian writer. He won the 2012 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa and the 2015 fiction fellowship of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing in Bulgaria. His fiction and poetry have been published in several literary journals including Granta, Prairie Schooner, Transition, The Massachusetts Review,among many others. He is currently enrolled in the MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, where he is a recipient of the Miles Morland Foundation African Scholarship.
Jekwu spoke to the Enkare Editorial team about his short story, Little Entertainment Centres.
When I first read “Little Entertainment Centres” I was admittedly in shock. The story deals with so many sensitive subjects at once that I was initially overwhelmed. Tell us a little about your process making this story, and what it meant both for your craft, and personally to complete and share it. Which writers/thinkers informed your process? To whom would you compare your style?
First off, I condemn pedophilia in its entirety. It is an awful attraction to possess. This story is expository fiction meant to unravel the modus operandi of pedophiles in our society, so that people would know and be watchful. The story is fiction, fiction, fiction, not a nonfiction essay. It is an imagined reality. The protagonist has a warped brain, extremely disgusting in its entirety. I was also shocked writing him, but I felt he had to be written.