STARKVILLE — When Chigozie Obioma told his mother he was writing a novel set during the Nigerian Civil War, she tried to discourage him from finishing it.

Obioma’s mother had lived through the war’s horrors, and she never wanted to talk about it. But when Obioma said he was going to finish it whether she liked it or not, she gave him one piece of advice: to tell the story fully and truly – including both the living and the dead.

Her encouragement became the epigraph and structure of Obioma’s latest novel “The Road to the Country,” which was published in 2024. Obioma shared the story and portions of the novel on Thursday night during a reading in Old Main Academic Center on the Mississippi State University campus, as the writer-in-residence hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences’ Institute for the Humanities.

“The main product of the war is death,” Obioma said. “War produces a lot of dead people. But also some people survive. But the people who tell the stories of wars are the living. So it’s not complete. You have to have the dead tell the other perspective.”

Obioma is from Nigeria, though he moved to the United States in 2010, earning his masters of fine arts from the University of Michigan, followed by a doctorate from the University of Nevada. He is currently a professor at the University of Georgia, and an acclaimed author with two novels published prior to “The Road to the Country.”

His most recent novel focuses on a shy, bookish student named Kunle whose country erupts into civil war, which in reality lasted from 1967 to 1970 between Nigeria’s federal government and the secessionist state Biafra in Obioma’s home country.

Throughout the course of the novel, Kunle becomes a battle-hardened soldier and a better man, Obioma said. And then, he becomes one of the war’s many casualties. Still, the story continues to follow him as he moves into the afterlife.

Obioma said “The Road to the Country” was a book that “nobody asked me to write,” but he had a vision in his head that he had to tell, as the war was not something he had seen anyone else write about in fiction. Not talking about the war, he said, was generally the path most Nigerians he knew took, particularly since the war was “asymmetrical.”

After fighting began, Obioma said, it became clear very quickly that Biafra was overwhelmingly overpowered by its enemies. And yet, they kept fighting for three years.

“So let’s say there’s a company of about 70 men facing a unit from the Nigerians,” Obioma said. “So the 70 men have about 30 rifles or 40. And ammunition, there’s about five bullets. So basically, you’re waiting for your partner to die, and for you to get one shot in. And your adversary has tanks. Has planes. Has artillery. … These people fought knowing they were going to die for three years. Not one day. Not one month. Not two months. Not even two years.”

While the characters in the novel are fictional, Obioma said the battles depicted are real, and he researched as much as possible to make them realistic.

While estimates of the number of people who died during the civil war vary, Obioma said the more than 1 million casualties and the general culture of silence around the war both spurred on his desire to write its story.

Obioma said he constantly tries to bring something new to each novel he writes. However, in all three novels he has written, he has focused on characters that go through psychological and emotional change, including in his first novel, “The Fishermen,” published in 2015, and his second novel, “An Orchestra of Minorities,” published in 2019.

His first two novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, an experience that he said “changed everything,” as it opened doors for his novel to be published in different countries and languages. Still, Obioma said the truest reward for writing his books has been seeing them come into being.

“When you write fiction, you’re trying to write things that don’t exist,” Obioma said. “They exist in your head. And the beauty or the payoff, if there is any such thing, other being invited to a place like this in the company of people you have not met before… is to see that work realized.”

Obioma’s reading was one of many engagements planned for him to interact with students, staff, faculty and the public during his visit between Tuesday and Saturday. He also spoke during a virtual workshop on Wednesday.

“I am very excited to spend a week with Chigozie talking and thinking about community, history and the ways that literature can be used to at once preserve traditions and write new stories,” Morgan Robinson, director of MSU’s Institute for the Humanities and associate professor of history, said in a press release.

The writer-in-residence program is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities through the Mississippi Humanities Council.