Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde’s debut novel Vagabonds will be published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group, in 2021.

This comes as welcome news as Osunde’s debut novel has been highly anticipated.

The publishers described Vagabonds as: “a tumultuous and unexpectedly joyous novel of oppression and defiance among the people and spirits of Lagos.”

In a statement published on her blog and titled “Something Beautiful,” Osunde comments on the inspiration for the book:

The book, like Lagos, is full of flawed people, spirits of all dispositions, children, lovers, squatters, families in their many iterations, queerness in all its forms, people of all classes and abilities. I’m proud to have written this. I’m proud of every time I fought to give myself what I knew I’d need to complete this book. I’m proud of the day I decided to choose this work with my chest and stop playing it safe. I wrote this because it’s the book I’ve been missing. I wrote it because I wanted a book that wasn’t shy to say what it meant, that wasn’t afraid to disregard and overwrite and upturn what is considered normal or upright or worthy; a book that isn’t afraid of its own madness; a book with its own secrets, rules and commandments.

Continue reading here.

Osunde’s writing and visual art have appeared in Catapult, Longreads, Vogue, The New York Times and Paper Magazine.

An alumnus of the 2015 Farafina Trust and 2018 Caine Prize Writing Workshops, she is a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow and a 2020 MacDowell Colony Fellow. She was awarded a Miles Morland Scholarship in 2017.

Brittle Paper congratulates Osunde.