Uzodinma Iweala

On this bonus episode of The Black List Table Reads with Franklin Leonard, we hear an in depth conversation with author Uzodinma Iweala. Uzo’s novel “Beasts of No Nation” was published when he was twenty three years old. In 2006, he won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions of Fiction Award, and a year later he was named one of America’s 20 Best Young Novelists by Granta magazine. Uzo joins Franklin to talk about growing up in Washington D.C. to Nigerian parents, his early fascination with paper, and how his novel (originally his Harvard senior thesis) “Beasts of No Nation” became one of the most anticipated films of this year’s Awards season, directed by Cary Fukunaga, starring Idris Elba, and to be released by Netflix.