EC Osondu: 'The  writer is also a strange animal'

Will Boast kicked off this Summer series of podcasts, discussing the bureaucracy and hostility that immigrants face all around the world. We'll be hearing from Elaine Vilar Madruga, Zhenya Oliinyk and Robin Munby over the next few weeks. But this time we welcome EC Osondu and his short story Uber Chat.

Osondu explains that he didn't start using Ubers because they were convenient. As a Black man in New York City, he was struggling to hail a cab until a passer-by told him about Uber.

"In less than five minutes," he says, "I got a ride."

He discovered that Uber drivers were often more interested in conversation than people driving cabs, and started to enjoy the strange intimacy of an app throwing you together with a stranger.

"It's highly unlikely that you'll meet that person again," Osondu explains. "There is some kind of freedom that comes with that, a certain lack of constraint. You don't censor yourself."

Even though he's been living in the US for more than a decade, the author still doesn't feel at home.

"The longer you live in America," he says, "the more conscious you are of your foreignness."

It's no surprise that American life is appearing in his fiction, Osondu continues. "Every writer who finds himself in any environment, you're like a sponge."

But an author isn't bound by their immediate surroundings. No writer "has ever been to Mars," he adds, but they've been "writing about Mars since the beginning of science fiction".

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