Akwaeke Emezi is a Nigerian-born writer and artist working across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual media. They are known for exploring indigenous Black realities, metaphysics, and the possibilities of re-indigenisation. Their work draws on ontologies of spirit, focusing on embodiment, ritual, and rememory.
Akwaeke Emezi was born in Umuahia, Nigeria, in 1987 and raised in Aba. At sixteen, they moved to the United States for college. They later attended Tufts University for veterinary school, earned a master’s degree in public policy at New York University, and studied writing at Syracuse University.
Reflecting on their early development, they said: “I wrote Freshwater, my debut novel, in the first eight months at the MFA. I signed with my agent after my first year.” Though they entered the American literary scene through Syracuse, they soon left the programme.
As Emezi recalled, “Graduating from an MFA programme was not the pinnacle of my career. I was adamant from the beginning that I was going to make a living from my writing and my writing only.”
Their debut novel, Freshwater (2018), was translated into thirteen languages and won the Otherwise Award and the Nommo Award. It was also a finalist for several prizes, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award.
Following Freshwater, Emezi published a series of acclaimed books across genres. Pet (2019) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, while The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) became a New York Times bestseller and won a Stonewall Honour. Their memoir Dear Senthuran (2021) was awarded the Stonewall Book Award for Nonfiction.
Emezi has continued to move across genres. Their poetry collection, Content Warning: Everything, appeared in 2022, and the young adult novel, Bitter, was published the same year. Their romance, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (2022), was a NAACP Image Award nominee and sold to Amazon Studios in a seven-figure deal, with Emezi executive producing alongside Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society.
Their fantasy Somadina was published in April 2025, and Son of the Morning is scheduled for release in November 2025.
Speaking of their approach, Emezi explained: “Anyone who knows my writing knows that I very rarely care about anything other than the actual work. I don’t care about teaching, I don’t care about networking. I only care about the work.”
Akwaeke Emezi has been recognised with a wide range of honours. They were named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree in 2018 and featured on the cover of TIME Magazine as a Next Generation Leader. Their work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Granta, and Vogue.
Photo credit: www.akwaeke.com
