Chris Abani is a Nigerian novelist and poet.

In 1985, Abani was arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of masterminding a political coup. The evidence was his first novel, a political thriller written when Abani was just sixteen years old. Since then, Abani has been imprisoned twice more, sentenced to death and tortured by electric shock.

He currently lives in exile in the United States where he is a faculty member of the University of California, Riverside Department of Creative Writing. He is the recipient of numerous literary awards including the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award.

1. Born: December 27, 1966
2. Currently on the Creative Writing Faculty of UC Riverside
3. Speaker at 2007 and 2008 TED Conference