Nigeria-American author Uzodinma Iweala is a graduate of Harvard University where he was a Mellon Mays Scholar and received a number of prizes for his writing, including the Eager Prize, the Horman Prize, the Le Baron Briggs Prize and the Hoopes Prize, awarded for outstanding undergraduate thesis. At only 23, he has earned numerous accolades for his first novel Beasts of No Nation (2005), which has won several awards including the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and has been translated into eleven languages.

In the novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country and as he is confronted with the horrors of war his character is transformed. While Mr. Iweala has never experienced the atrocities he writes about first hand, he frequently visited Nigeria (where his mother is currently the finance minister) as a child and lived there for a year as an adult, working with refugees. As result of these experiences, critics praised Iweala’s ability to compellingly portray the complexities of his main character.  Booklist writes that “Iweala distills his story to the most urgent and visceral atrocities, and the scenes of bloodshed and rape are made more excruciating by the lyrical, rhythmic language. In the narrator's memories of village life, biblical stories and creation myths, Iweala explores the mutable separation between human and beast and a child's struggle to rediscover his own humanity after war.” The San Francisco Chronicle commented that this young author’s debut novel was “written in an appropriately choppy, raw present-tense that captures Agu’s visceral, gut-wrenching emotions as he kills innocent women and children, Beasts introduces a powerful new voice in fiction.”

Interested in health and human rights issues, Iweala has worked on development projects in Nigeria and New York, and is currently attending Columbia University medical school.