’Pemi Aguda

'Pemi Aguda came to fiction through the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, where she completed her MFA. Her short stories have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, and Zoetrope: All-Story. She works primarily in the short form; her first novel, One Leg on Earth, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2026.

The Lagos of her fiction is interior rather than panoramic: a kitchen, a bedroom, the particular silence between a mother and a daughter. Postcolonial politics stays low in the narrative, felt in the body of the story rather than argued at the surface. Her work is most often discussed in the register of the Afro-gothic, with magical realism as a close neighbor. The uncanny enters through small domestic cracks, not spectacle.

The prizes have arrived steadily. Individual stories have taken an O. Henry Prize, the Writivism Prize, and a Nommo Award. Ghostroots, her 2024 collection, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and a World Fantasy Award.

Start with Ghostroots. It opens with "Manifest," in which a woman sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter's face, and the daughter is soon overtaken by destructive impulses. That story sets the collection's whole register: the terrible and the ordinary braided into a single household. For a single self-contained piece, "Breastmilk" is a strong entry point.