Birth— 
Where—Nugu, Nigeria
Raised in— Queens
Education—MFA from Brooklyn College
Currently—

Bibliography

• Olive Witch: a memoir (2016)

• The Lovers and the Leavers: a novel in stories (2014; 2015)

• The Long Way Home: a book of travel photographs and poems (2013)

She was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and lived in the university town of Nsukka until she was 13. Her family then moved to the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she completed high school. Her parents still live in Pittsburgh where her father is a fiction writer and retired professor of geology and her mother teaches computers and economics.

She considers Philadelphia her first real home in the US as she spent the decade after high school in that vastly underrated city. She did business undergrad and grad school there and also worked and played frisbee and danced and biked all over town. However, San Francisco, where she lived for four years and did her writing degree, is her favourite city in the US, maybe in the world.

In the summer of 2005, armed with a one way ticket to Bangkok, she left San Francisco to go travelling for a year (this turned into seven). She spent two years, on and off, in Bangladesh and India, funded in part by a Fulbright Scholarship, during which she researched and wrote her novel in stories, The Lovers and the Leavers (Bengal Lights Books 2014; HarperCollins India 2015).

Between 2005 and 2102 she spent seven years on the road. She spent three years, on and off, in Bangladesh and India creating a linked collection of stories, revising her memoir, and starting a novel. The rest of the time, she rented or borrowed rooms in 30 countries on five continents, taken over 20,000 photographs, and kept writing and rewriting her version of how people and places are linked. “These” connections, she say, “are older than time, unheeding of distance. It’s how I can see Dhaka in London, speak of Mexico City and Kolkata’s arty religious topographies in the same breath, compare the sexed-up foodie cultures of Bangkok and Rio and San Francisco, or find the solitude of Bhutan’s mountains in the salt flats of Bolivia. I’ve been lost, robbed of everything, molested, gravely ill, heart-broken, and afraid, but more than anything, it’s been a transcending and joyful seven years.”

Her novel in stories “The Lovers and the Leavers” was published by Bengal Lights Books (2014) and is forthcoming from HarperCollins India (2015). She has also published a coffee table book of travel photographs and poems called “The Long Way Home” (Ogro Bangladesh, 2013).

In 2016, HarperCollins India published her memoir Olive Witch, about growing up in Nigeria, the States, and Bangladesh.

She is also working on a novel called Memory Alone (about memory loss, set in Berkeley and Brooklyn), a collection of travel themed erotic short stories called F Is for Fire, and a series of ekphrastic poems.

Olive Witch (2016)
Abeer Y. Hoque
Olive Witch is about everyone Hoque has ever loved. It is also about the despair that descends despite that love, an unremitting, irrational depression that draws a curtain across all that is bright and comforting about the world. As much as Olive Witch brings to life the frangipanis in Nsukka, the freedoms of the US and the familial belongings in Bangladesh

The Lovers and the Leavers (2015)
Abeer Y. Hoque
The Lovers and the Leavers by Abeer Y. Hoque is about love, it most definitely is not a romantic novel. In fact, it isn’t a novel at all, but a series of short stories, each centered on a character that features as a secondary or tertiary character earlier or later, reflecting the web of life in the most extraordinary way.