While 2024 has been perhaps the busiest and most hectic year of her career, Nnedi Okorafor wouldn’t have it any other way. She was inducted into the Science Fiction & Fantasy Hall of Fame in July. She published the novella She Who Knows: Firespitter in August. She’s currently promoting her new autobiographical novel, Death of the Author, out in January from Morrow. That will be followed by a second novella, One Way Witch, and a graphic novel, The Space Cat, both due in 2025. Another book, set in the universe of her 2010 novel Who Fears Death, is slated for 2026.
“It’s like a perfect storm,” she says via Zoom from her home in Phoenix, where she’s a professor of practice at Arizona State University. “I’m just trying to ride the wild. It’s pretty insane. In a good way, though.”
One might think Okorafor would be used to this pace by now. She’s the author of dozens of novels, novellas, graphic novels, and comic books. When asked for an exact number, she admits she’s lost count. “Because I shape-shift so much. I’m Nigerian,” she says, laughing. “No matter what we do, we always have great expectations of ourselves.”
And while she has earned many accolades—Hugos, Nebulas, a Locus Award—Death of the Author feels fresh and new, and she’s full of nerves about it. The apocalyptic SF saga follows a writer named Zelu, the paraplegic black sheep of a large Nigerian American family, who is fired from her adjunct teaching job after she blows up at a student. In her despair, she writes a futuristic epic about intelligent androids and the end of humanity titled Rusted Robots, which becomes a massive bestseller and changes her life.
“It’s the most personal book I’ve ever written,” she says. “My sisters and I have been talking about this book about our family for many years. So, it has lived in the back of my head. And then when my sister Ngozi passed—she was only 48 and it was unexpected, and it destroyed me—I had to write my way out.”
She started working on Death of the Author two days after her sister’s death in 2021. “I needed to do something,” she says, adding that talking about the book at press events and to the media has been challenging. “I’m up there and I still can’t. I’m just going to fall apart. This book is fresh. This book is foolish. It’s so my family. It’s the most Nnedi book I’ve ever written.”
Born in Cincinnati and raised in a suburb of Chicago, Okorafor was the third of four children raised by a cardiovascular surgeon and a registered nurse. “We were one of the first Black families to move in there,” she says. “And it was bottom line racist. I heard the N-word often. I had to run for my life a lot. But I had a rosy childhood. My memory of it is not darkness. My parents, they were always the cream of the crop. So, they expected that of us: there is opportunity here. You go get it, by any means necessary. Don’t let the obstacles hold you back.”
Okorafor did just that. Long before she became a writer, she and her two older sisters were on track to become tennis stars. “Like Venus and Serena, but there were three of us,” she says. “My first trophy was when I was nine. We were playing nationals. And boy, tennis is a racist sport. But we’d still win.”
Okorafor was also always a reader. “I was a library kid,” she says. “I loved the library, and so did my sisters. Books were like magic to us. And then I discovered novels. That was the opening of worlds to me. There was just something about the narratives that took me.”
And while she loved reading—Stephen King and Clive Barker were early favorites—tennis was front and center. “I’d have these thick books with me on the tennis court,” she says. “But I never thought of writing anything, even though I was good at it.”
When Okorafor was 13, she was diagnosed with scoliosis. “They put me in a back brace in high school,” she says, “and that was hell.” She stuck with tennis and in 1992 was playing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. But by the time she turned 19 the condition had become more severe. Her doctors told her she would need surgery. “I was too young to understand the severity of it,” she says. “I woke up nine hours later, paralyzed from the waist down. And that was the moment that changed everything.”
In the hospital, “something was happening in my head,” she says. “When you’re trapped in your body and there’s nothing you can do, all of that energy has to go somewhere. And so, I just started writing. It was like walking on a tightrope with nothing underneath you. It felt risky. It felt like I was creating something from nothing. It was the most profound feeling I’d ever had. And the immensity of that was enough to fight back all the darkness that was descending on me.”
Writing gave Okorafor the same adrenaline rush she got from tennis. “It’s intoxicating and you just want more,” she says. “I wanted to make it bigger and grow it and see where it went. And that was how I started writing. That was a turning point.”
After she recovered from the surgery—she had to relearn how to walk—a friend suggested she take a creative writing class. “I was just unleashed,” she says. “I wrote a few short stories. By the end of that class, I was already writing a novel. I needed to be able to find who I was. I needed the space. I needed the knowledge, the smarts, the information. The freedom to figure out what the hell was going on with me.”
Okorafor graduated with a BA in rhetoric in 1996. She then got an MA in journalism from Michigan State in 1999, an MA in English from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2002, and a PhD in literature from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2007. Along the way, she published a short story, “Amphibious Green,” which was a finalist for a Hurston/Wright Award. “It was just this slow progression,” she says, “a little thing published here, another piece there.”
Still, those early days of her career were not without challenges; she struggled to find an agent, facing entrenched racism in the publishing industry. It was “because I was writing about being Nigerian American,” Okorafor says. “One agent accused me of being divisive for writing about the experiences of the specific type of cultural blending. It was crazy.”
But she kept writing, and in 2005 she published Zahrah the Windseeker, a YA fantasy sold to Andrea Davis Pinkney, who was then at Houghton Mifflin. “She was in charge and she was a Black woman, and she just got it,” Okorafor says. From there, her career took off.
In Death of the Author, Zelu must contend with the ways Rusted Robots—and its portrayal of a future without humans—changes her and may even foretell the future of life on Earth. The book was motivated in part by Okorafor’s desire to explore the current fascination with and backlash against AI.
“Art is the most human thing about us, right?” Okorafor says. “So, the controversy is, Why are you going to take the root of humanity away? And that’s why at the heart of Death of the Author is storytelling. That is the greatest thing that human beings have created, so I isolated the issue by killing off all the humans. What remains important about humanity? And is it worth preserving? What do we leave behind?”
It’s a question she thinks about frequently, and part of the reason she defines her work as specifically Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism. “The distinctions matter,” she says. “You can come from a Nigerian American culture and not interact with it all. But my sisters and I were dialoguing with everything. I’ve always observed, always listened, and always processed it this way.”
And as 2024 draws to a close, Okorafor shows no signs of slowing down. She now has her sights set on Hollywood: her 2014 novel Lagoon is being adapted by Amblin Entertainment, with Okorafor slated write the screenplay. “I’m still writing about diaspora, and I’m still blending all the genres, and I’ll just keep doing it,” she says. “I was always going to do what I wanted, to write what I wanted, because that’s the way it started and the way I found it. It was always going to guide me.”
Sona Charaipotra is a journalist, editor, and the author of six books.
