Thirty years after the Nigerian military government executed her father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Noo Saro-Wiwa has written the book that only she could write. The Burning Ground: Oil and Militancy in Nigeria, published  on 14 April 2026, by Columbia Global Reports, traces the rise of the armed insurgency that followed her father’s death and examines how it became entangled with politics, further damaging the environment and upending the social fabric of the Niger Delta.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged by the Sani Abacha regime on 10 November 1995, alongside eight other Ogoni activists, after a nonviolent campaign for environmental justice and the rights of the Ogoni people against the devastation wrought by Shell’s oil extraction in their homeland. His death provoked international outrage, Nigeria’s suspension from the Commonwealth, and, in the Delta itself, the conditions for a militancy that would define the region for the next three decades.

In The Burning Ground, Noo travels across the Delta to take stock of that aftermath, speaking with former militants, centering the undervalued role of women in the region’s story, and meeting individuals working toward sustainable development in a place where environmental destruction, political conflict, human rights crises, and accelerating climate threats press against each other with compounding force.

Saro-Wiwa is the author of two previous prize-winning books: Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (2012) and Black Ghosts: The Lives of Africans in China (2023). Both were works of travel writing; The Burning Ground marks her move into investigative nonfiction, and the subject could not be more personal or more urgent. The book is 128 pages, lean, precise, and by all accounts unsparing.

The Burning Ground is available now. Order via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.