She did it! Nnedi Okorafor has won the Outstanding Literary Work — Fiction award at the 57th NAACP Image Awards for Death of the Author (William Morrow), and we could not be more thrilled. The win was announced on 23 February 2026 during the first night of the ceremony’s virtual pre-show and if you were watching, you already know the room felt it. The main live telecast followed on 28 February at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

This is Okorafor’s first NAACP Image Award win, and only her second nomination in the award’s history. The first was in 2008, when The Shadow Speaker was shortlisted in the Youth/Teen category. Nearly two decades later, she has the prize and she has it for what may be the most ambitious novel of her career.

The NAACP Image Awards are voted on by NAACP members, not industry juries, which gives a win here a particular weight. Often described as the “Black Oscars,” the awards recognise artists and entertainers of colour whose work resonates within the Black community specifically. For Okorafor, whose entire literary project is rooted in Nigerian mythology, Africanfuturism, and the specific textures of the Black diaspora experience, to be recognised by that constituency directly is its own kind of validation. Death of the Author beat out a strong shortlist to take the prize:

• Can’t Get Enough — Kennedy Ryan (Forever/Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group)
• Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic — Harmonia Rosales (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Death of the Author — Nnedi Okorafor (William Morrow) — WINNER
• Happy Land — Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Berkley, Penguin Random House)
• Harlem Rhapsody — Victoria Christopher Murray (Berkley, Penguin Random House)

Death of the Author follows Zelu, a disabled Nigerian-American writer who has always been the odd one out in her large, traditional Nigerian family; unmarried by choice, devoted to writing, uninterested in medicine or law. When she finally shares her science fiction novel with the world, it takes off in ways she never anticipated, catapulting her into a literary stardom that begins to consume everything the book was meant to be. The novel travels from Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, carrying two narratives in parallel: the intimate, often funny drama of Zelu navigating family judgment and sudden fame, and the full text of her in-universe sci-fi epic unfolding alongside it. It is, in the most literal sense, a book about what it costs to write a book.

We named Death of the Author to Brittle Paper’s 2025 Notable Books list, and when the NAACP nominations were announced in January, we noted it among the two African works shortlisted. The book is also the major text assigned for the 2025-2026 Great World Texts in Wisconsin program. This ambitious statewide initiative will see high school teachers and students throughout Wisconsin engage with Okorafor’s masterpiece of metafiction, described as “surprisingly funny, deeply poignant, and endlessly discussable.”

The win confirms what we already knew: this is one of the most significant novels Okorafor has written and, given that she coined the term Africanfuturism to describe her own literary framework, that is saying something.

Congratulations from all of us at Brittle Paper, Nnedi!