Lagos Noir

About the Contributors

Chris Abani, a Nigerian-born, award-winning poet and novelist, currently teaches at Northwestern University in Chicago. He is the recipient of a PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, a PEN/ Hemingway Award, and a Guggenheim Award.

Leye Adenle is a Nigerian writer whose debut novel, Easy Motion Tourist, set in Lagos, won the 2016 Prix Marianne. Leye has also appeared onstage in London in plays including Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again. He comes from a family of writers, the most famous of whom was his grandfather, Oba Adeleye Adenle I, a former king of Oshogbo in southwest Nigeria. Leye currently lives in London.

'Pemi Aguda writes short stories, a great number of which have been influenced by the chaotic city of Lagos, where she’s lived most of her life. Her short story “Caterer, Caterer” won the 2015 Writivism Short Story Prize.

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt in 1979 and has lived in Eko (Lagos) since 2007. Most of the stories in his collection Love Is Power, or Something Like That were set in the fictional city of Poteko. His first ​novel, Blackass, which was published by Graywolf Press in 2016, was the first time he wrote the city of Lagos into fiction.

Jude Dibia was born in Lagos, where he spent most of his early years. Lagos has always been an integral part and presence in his writings, from his debut novel Walking with Shadows, to his most recent, Blackbird. A recipient of the Ken Saro-Wiwa Prize for Prose and a Commonwealth Writing Prize, Dibia continues to work on new fiction from Sweden, where he lives.

Onyinye Ihezukwu was born in Nigeria, where she worked as a radio broadcaster in Lagos. She is a 2015–2017 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Wale Lawal is a Lagos-based management consultant and the founder/editor of The Republic: A Journal of Nigerian Affairs. He tweets from @WalleLawal.

Sarah Ladipo Manyika was raised in Lagos and Jos, Nigeria. She has also lived in Kenya, France, and England. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently serves on the boards of Hedgebrook and the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Her second novel, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, was short-listed for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize.

Uche Okonkwo has an MA in creative writing from the University of Manchester, and has worked as a managing editor at Farafina, a leading Lagos-based independent publisher. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Per Contra, Ellipsis, and other outlets, and her 2016 essay “What the Road Offers” was published by Invisible Borders as a limited-edition chapbook. She was a spring 2017 resident at Writers Omi, Ledig House.

Nnedi Okorafor is a Nigerian-American writer of speculative fiction and an associate professor at the University at Buffalo, New York. Her works include Who Fears Death, the Binti novella series, The Book of Phoenix, the Akata Witch series, and Lagoon. She is the winner of Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards and her debut novel Zahrah the Windseeker won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. Learn more about Okorafor at nnedi.com.

E. C. Osondu grew up in Lagos and is the author of the collection of stories Voice of America and the novel This House Is Not For Sale. He is a winner of the Caine Prize, also known as the “African Booker,” and a Pushcart Prize. His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, AGNI, n+1, Guernica, Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, New Statesman, and many other places.

Adebola Rayo is a full-time writer, editor, and TV series junkie who has lived most of her life in Lagos. Her works have appeared in 234NEXT, Saraba Literary Magazine, and Sentinel Nigeria. She has a law degree and no idea what to do with it.

Chika Unigwe was born and raised in Enugu, Nigeria. Author of several books, including On Black Sisters’ Street and Night Dancer, Unigwe is the 2016 Bonderman Professor of Writing at Brown Uiversity in Providence, Rhode Island.