Award-winning Nigerian writer Pemi Aguda will release her debut short story collection Ghostroots in 2024 and her novel The Suicide Mothers in 2025. Both books will be published by W. W. Norton.

Aguda is a prize-winning author whose fans have been waiting for publications news with excitement. She won the 2022 O. Henry Prize for her short story “Breastmilk” and her novel manuscript for The Suicide Mothers won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. We cannot wait to read her upcoming books!

See Aguda’s book news announcement on Twitter below:

Aguda’s forthcoming works sound absolutely fascinating based on the Publisher’s Marketplace description! Her 2024 collection Ghostroots features 12 surreal stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos, where “characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties.” Aguda’s 2025 novel The Suicide Mothers follows a “pregnant young woman during an epidemic of bizarre deaths that has rattled the Nigerian cultural capital.”

Fans of Aguda’s short stories will know that her fiction strikes the perfect balance between horror and fantasy. For those who would like to read a snippet of Aguda’s work, her short story  “Masquerade Season” is available online.

Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria, and earned an MFA at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is currently a 2022 MacDowell fellow and was a fiction fellow with the 2021 Miami Book Fair. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship from the Carl Brandon Society and an Emerging Writer fellowship from Aspen Summer Words.

Congrats to Aguda on her debut collection and novel!