His debut novel Chain-Gang All-Stars is a gripping satire of the US penal system. The award-winning short story writer talks voyeurism, violence and trying to make a difference
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is exhausted. He’s back at home having taken 19 flights in 20 days to promote his first novel Chain-Gang All-Stars, which came out in the US in May. “It was kind of brutal,” he says, though he admits that one of those flights served to transport him to his best friend’s bachelor party in Cartagena, Colombia’s Caribbean party town. How is he holding up? “The events were good. Everything else in between was a little rough. I’ve been acting as though I’m done, but I’m not – yesterday, I realised I had to do something an hour into the event starting … ”
He’s talking to me from his apartment in the Bronx, New York, in a room crammed with boxes and books, a suit hanging wonkily on a clothes rack behind him. His award-winning collection of short stories, Friday Black – on which he’d worked intensely for years (he was “crazy” and “obsessed”, he says) – became a surprise bestseller in 2018 when he was still in his 20s. Now 32, he’s receiving plaudits for a work of speculative fiction that, according to the Washington Post, “should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of doing”.
