By CHARLES McGRATH

In 2004, when the Reverend Uwem Akpan applied to the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, his folder attracted a lot of attention. He was both a Nigerian and a Jesuit priest, and the program was unused to applicants from either category.
And though Father Akpan’s talent was abundantly evident, if a little raw, Eileen Pollack, the director of the program, recalled recently, there was some hesitation on the part of the admissions committee.
“There were discussions about having a priest be part of workshops where students would be writing about sex and drugs, Ms. Pollack said.
But in the end Father Akpan was admitted, and he endeared himself, Ms. Pollack recalled, by showing up on the first day of class wearing a University of Michigan sweatshirt. “Everyone loved him, she said. “It turned out he had had more experience of the dark side of the world than all the other students put together.
Much of that experience is on display in “Say You’re One of Them, Father Akpan’s debut collection of stories, just published by Little, Brown & Company and already attracting attention among critics and booksellers.
Each of the book’s five stories is set in a different African country, and each is told from the point of view of a child subjected to poverty, dislocation or worse. One story is about a Kenyan street family in which the breadwinner is a 12-year-old prostitute and the parents give their children glue to sniff because it’s cheaper than food and dulls their hunger.
In another story a young Rwandan girl watches her father, a Hutu, kill her mother because she’s a Tutsi. The collection’s title comes from this story. “Say you’re one of them” is the mother’s final advice to her daughter.
Over lunch recently at Merkato 55, an African restaurant in New York, Father Akpan, 37, was already thinking ahead to his imminent return to Africa and to his main job these days, teaching at a seminary in Zimbabwe.
Father Akpan is from the southern Nigerian village of Ikot Akpan Eda. His mother insisted that he and his three brothers speak English as well as their native language, Annang.
He entered the Jesuit order at 19, and began writing about 10 years later, while he was still a seminarian. His original goal was to publish nonfiction and possibly get a column in The Guardian, a Nigerian newspaper. When his submissions were turned down, he began writing for the paper’s Saturday fiction page .
By the time he arrived at Michigan, Father Akpan had several hundred pages’ worth of fiction stored in his laptop, thanks in part to his habit of working on several stories at once and revising them over and over. Even after this first book, he has hundreds more pages that he’s working on.
From the beginning Father Akpan had an ear for African speech in all its variety - pidgin and patois and local dialects. His story “Luxurious Hearses” has people from all over Nigeria debating on a bus, and the result is an immensely pleasing cacophony in which people are characterized not so much by what they say as how they say it.
“Listen, one character says, “dis foreign TV channels dey spoil de image of our country.... We no bad like dis. O.K., why dem no dey show corpses of deir people during crisis for TV? Abi, people no dey kill for America or Europe?” And another character shouts back, “You dey speak grammar!
“I try to listen, Father Akpan said, shrugging, “and I try to really get into my characters. But a big part of this is mysterious to me when I get into the writing process. There are people who know their culture through and through and still can’t write about it.