Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedimma Nkemdili "Nnedi" Okorafor (formerly Okorafor-Mbachu; born April 8, 1974) is a Nigerian American writer of science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults.

She is best known for her Binti Series and her novels Who Fears Death, Zahrah the Windseeker, Akata Witch, Akata Warrior, Lagoon and Remote Control. She has also written for comics and film.

Her writing is Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism, which is heavily influenced by her dual Nigerian and American heritage.

She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Eisner Award and World Fantasy Award.

She is considered to be among the third generation of Nigerian writers.

Nnedimma Nkemdili Okorafor was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1974 to Igbo Nigerian parents who travelled to America in 1969 to attend school but could not return to Nigeria due to the Nigerian Civil War.

She holds both American and Nigerian citizenship.

Okorafor is the third child in a family of four children and grew up in Chicago, Illinois, often travelling to Nigeria to spend holidays with her extended family.

Her first name is Igbo for "mother is good".

During her years attending Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, Illinois, Okorafor was a nationally-known tennis and track star and excelled in math and the sciences.

She wanted to be an entomologist.

She was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of 13, a condition that worsened as she grew older.

At age 19, she underwent spinal fusion surgery to straighten and fuse her spine; a rare complication led to Okorafor becoming paralyzed from the waist down.

Okorafor turned to writing small stories in the margins of a science-fiction book that she had.

It was the first time she had ever written anything creatively.

That summer, with intense physical therapy, Okorafor regained her ability to walk with a cane, but she was unable to continue her athletic career.

At the suggestion of a friend, she took a creative writing class that spring semester and was writing her first novel by the semester's end.

She completed her college education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, before obtaining a master's degree in journalism from Michigan State University and a master's degree and PhD in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago.

She is a 2001 graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop in Lansing, Michigan.

She currently lives in Arizona with her family.

Okorafor received a 2001 Hurston-Wright literary award for her story "Amphibious Green".

Okorafor's short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, including Dark Matter: Reading The Bones, Enkare Review, Strange Horizons, Moondance magazine, and Writers of the Future Volume XVIII.

It includes the titular piece, co-authored by Alan Dean Foster, six other previously unpublished short stories, and 14 stories that had been previously published in other venues since 2001, with a foreword by Whoopi Goldberg.

After her 2001 Hurston-Wright award, she published two acclaimed books for young adults, The Shadow Speaker (Hyperion/Disney Book Group) and Zahrah the Windseeker (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

The Shadow Speaker was a winner of the Carl Brandon Parallax Award, a Booksense Pick for Winter 2007/2008, a Tiptree Honor Book, a finalist for the Essence Magazine Literary Award, the Andre Norton Award and the Golden Duck Award, and an NAACP Image Award nominee.

Her children's book, Long Juju Man, was the 2007–08 winner of the Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa.

Okorafor's first adult novel, Who Fears Death (DAW/Penguin Books), won the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, was nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award.

In 2011, she returned to young adult with Akata Witch (Viking/Penguin), the first book in the Nsibidi Scripts Series, which was a Junior Library Guild Selection.

A collection of her stories, titled Kabu Kabu, was published by Prime Books in 2013.

The Binti trilogy began with the 2015 novella, Binti.

Binti won both the 2016 Nebula Award and 2016 Hugo Award for best novella, and was a finalist for a British Science Fiction Association Award (Best Short) and BooktubeSFF Award (Best Short Work).

Also in 2016, the United Bank for Africa, a Nigerian bank, partnered with Cassava Republic Press to distribute 24,000 copies of Okorafor's novel Akata Witch in nine African countries.

This was followed by Binti: Home, published in 2017, and Binti: The Night Masquerade, published in 2018.

The prequel The Book of Phoenix won the 2018 Kurd Laßwitz Preis and was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

The sequel, Akata Warrior, went on to win the 2018 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book.

Okorafor's science fiction novel Lagoon was a finalist for a British Science Fiction Association Award (Best Novel), a Red Tentacle Award (Best Novel), and a Tiptree Honor Book.

Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade both received Hugo nominations for best novella in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

In 2020, Okorafor released her middle grade novel Ikenga, which was nominated for the Edgar Award.

Okorafor's science fiction novella Remote Control, set in a near future Ghana, was published in January 2021.

Her adult novel Noor, set in a futurist northern Nigeria, was released in November 2021.