Nigerian author, Pemi Aguda has been announced as one of the longlisted authors for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, recognized for her debut short story collection, Ghostroots.
Ghostroots is set in the bustling and chaotic city of Lagos. The twelve stories explore the lives of ordinary people grappling with extraordinary circumstances, from infidelity and mysterious illnesses to accidents and haunting family histories. The collection is anchored in the everyday struggles of its characters while introducing speculative elements that blur the lines between reality and the supernatural.
Selected from a total of 473 books for consideration in the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction by the panel of judges, which included Jamie Ford, Lauren Groff (Chair), Zeyn Joukhadar, Chawa Magaña, and Reginald McKnight, Pemi Aguda’s Ghostroots has earned a spot on the longlist leading the African continent with ease!
Established in 1950, the National Book Awards are American literary prizes administered by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organisation. A pantheon of writers such as William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Robert Lowell, Walker Percy, John Updike, Katherine Anne Porter, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Adrienne Rich, Thomas Pynchon, Alice Walker, E. Annie Proulx, Jesmyn Ward, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have all won National Book Awards. Although other categories have been recognized in the past, the Awards currently honour the best Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature, published each year.
Pemi Aguda was born in Nigeria and lives in Lagos, where she works as an architect. Aguda won the 2015 Writivism Short Story Prize and was the first recipient of the first Writivism Stellenbosch University writing residency. Her stories are published in Omenana Magazine, Saraba, The Kalahari Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Wrong Quarterly and in Prufrock Magazine. Her work also appears in short story anthologies.
The finalists will be revealed on October 1, 2024, and the winners will be announced at the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 20, 2024. For more information on the longlist, visit the National Book Awards website .
Congratulations Pemi Aguda!
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
