Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, 33, made his debut in 2018 with the story collection Friday Black, praised by Bernardine Evaristo as “so daring and mind-bending… that you haven’t a clue where he’s going to take you”. His first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, now out in paperback and currently on the shortlist for this year’s Arthur C Clarke science fiction award (announced on 24 July), takes place in a future in which live-streamed combat between death-row convicts has become prime-time entertainment. Adjei-Brenyah, born and raised in New York, was speaking from his home in the Bronx.
Where did Chain-Gang All-Stars begin?
I’d been working with this group to try to end solitary confinement in New York state, because it’s known pretty much universally to be torture. I actually got involved with them because they were trying to support my former school district – it was being mismanaged and children of colour were being treated poorly – but the group [Rockland Coalition to End the New Jim Crow] was also interested in the rights and outcomes of people who are incarcerated. I’m interested in systems that get us to buy into violence and trick us into stepping on each other’s heads – literally, metaphorically – and I view the prison system as a huge version of that. Ninety-nine per cent of people in prison are impoverished and suffering from mental health problems and diseases of addiction. The idea that you can put humans in cages only stifles our ability to respond to these systemic issues with compassion. Carceral solutions to serious human problems perpetuate those problems.
