Canada-based Nigerian writer and software engineer Vincent Anioke is set to publish his debut short story collection titled Perfect Little Angels in spring 2024 with Arsenal Pulp Press.

According to Publisher’s Marketplace, Anioke’s Perfect Little Angels is a short story collection that grapples with “themes of power inequality, group dynamics, tradition clashing against the realities of our world, and the courage it can sometimes take to be honest about who we really are.”

Vincent Anioke is a software engineer at Google and a writer. He was born and raised in Nigeria, studied Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and currently lives in Canada. He is the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize Winner and was also shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

In a Google Canada interview, Anioke remarks that tech and writing have always been his two greatest passions:

Since I was a kid I’ve always written voraciously in my free time. Back in Nigeria, my dad had a huge library of books, which inspired me to work on writing my own novel. These days, my focus is writing short stories for publication in literary magazines. The stories are usually melancholy and introspective in nature, and are usually set in my home country of Nigeria. I’ve also been shortlisted and longlisted for a few literature prizes. Tech and the arts are often situated as oppositional, so I think my deep and abiding love of writing might surprise people.

Anioke’s short stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Split Lip Magazine, Carve, and Pithead Chapel, among others. Read his short stories here.

Congrats to Anioke on his debut short story collection!