Nnedi Okorafor Biography
Nnedi Okorafor Age|Birthday
Nnedi Okorafor was born on April 8, 1974, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. Nnedi Okorafor is 45 years old as of 2019. She celebrates her birthday on April 8 every year. Her full names are (Nnedimma Nkemdili “Nnedi” Okorafor)
Nnedi Okorafor Education
Nnedi Okorafor attended Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor. During her years attending Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, IL, she was nationally-known for tennis and track star, and she excelled in math and sciences. Due to her interest in insects, she desired to be an entomologist. She is a 2001 graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop in Lansing, Michigan, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Nnedi Okorafor Family
Nnedi Okorafor was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to two Igbo (Nigerian) immigrant parents) known for weaving African culture into creative evocative settings and memorable characters.
Nnedi Okorafor Husband
Nnedi Okorafor is not yet married but she is in a relationship.
Nnedi Okorafor Net Worth
She is a Nigerian-American fantasy writer and science fiction who has an estimated net worth of $1 million dollars.
Nnedi Okorafor Work Short stories
In 2001, Nnedi received the Hurston-Wright literary award for her “Amphibious Green.” Her short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, including Dark Matter: Reading The Bones, Enkare Review, The Strange Horizons, Moondance magazine, and Writers of the Future Volume XVIII.
Some of her collection stories titled Kabu Kabu were published by Prime Books in 2013. They include the titular piece, co-authored by Alan Dean Foster, and six other previously unpublished short stories, as well as 14 stories that had been previously published in other venues since 2001, and a foreword by Whoopi Goldberg.
Nnedi Okorafor Novels and novellas
After her 2001 Hurston-Wright award, she then published two acclaimed books for young adults, The Shadow Speaker (Hyperion/Disney Book Group) and Zahrah the Windseeker (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Zahrah won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Her first adult novel, Who Fears Death (DAW/Penguin Books), won the 2011 World Fantasy Award for being the Best Novel, for the 2011 Tiptree Honor Book and it was nominated in the 2010 Nebula Award.
In 2011, she returned to the young adult together with Akata Witch (Viking/Penguin), which was a Junior Library Guild Selection, that was nominated for the Andre Norton Award. It was also on the American Library Association’s Amelia Bloomer Project list that was honoring children’s books with feminist themes. The sequel Akata Warrior went on to and won the 2018 Locus Award for the Best Young Adult Novel.
Akata Warrior won the first Lodestar Award for being the Best Young Adult Book, an award that was given by the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) and presented at the Hugo Award ceremony at Worldcon. Okorafor science fiction novel Lagoon was a finalist for a British Science Fiction Association Award (Best Novel) and a Red Tentacle Award (Best Novel) and a Tiptree Honor Book.
The Binti trilogy began in with a 2015 novella, Binti. This was followed by Binti: which was Home, published in 2017, and Binti: The Night Masquerade, published in 2018. The Binti won both the 2016 Nebula Award and the 2016 Hugo Award for being the best novella and he was a finalist for a British Science Fiction Association Award (Best Short) and BooktubeSFF Award (Best Short Work). Binti: Home was a finalist for the 2018 Hugo Award for best novella, and Binti: The Night Masquerade was a finalist for the 2019 Hugo in the same category.
Nnedi Okorafor Adaptations
Okorafor announced via her Facebook that her science-meets-witchcraft short story “Hello, Moto” which was optioned by Nigerian production company Fiery Film in February 2017. The story is being adapted into a short film, titled Hello, Rain by filmmaker, C. J. Obasi. The story also tells the tale of a woman who discovers that she can merge witchcraft and technology when she creates wigs for herself and her friends that allowed them to wield the influence and power, to help battle corruption.
Instead, she watches her friends themselves become corrupted. A teaser was released in January 2018. Hello, Rain had its world premiere at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen on 6 May 2018. Okorafor announced via her Twitter that Who Fears Death was picked up by HBO in July 2017 to become a TV series with novelist and Game of Thrones producer, George R.R. Martin, joining the project as an executive producer.
Okorafor will remain involved with the project as a consultant. In April 2019, the news was announced that Okorafor would co-write the screenplay of an adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed with filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu for Amazon Prime Video. It will be produced by Viola Davis.
Nnedi Okorafor Other work
In 2005, Okorafor wrote and published her first play, Full Moon. The Buxville Theater Company in Chicago helped in the production of the full-length theatrical work. Okorafor donated her archive to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) Collection of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Northern Illinois University Library in 2009.
Okorafor was the Young Adult Author special Guest of Honor at Detcon 1, the 2014 North American Science Fiction Convention; Detcon1 was putting special emphasis on YA science fiction. She spoke at the TEDGlobal conference in Arusha, Tanzania, in August 2017. In October 2017, Okorafor announced via Twitter she would be writing three issues for Marvel’s Black Panther, picking up where author Ta-Nehisi Coates left off.
The first issue of Black Panther: Long Live the King was released in December 2017. A short comic by Okorafor was included in Marvel’s Venomverse War Stories in the No. 1. Entitled “Blessing in Disguise”, this comic was inspired by the 2014 Boko Haram kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian girls.
In March 2017, it was announced that Okorafor would return to writing derived from the Black Panther, in Wakanda Forever, where the Dora Milaje team-up with Spider-Man, X-Men, and Avengers. In July 2018, it announced that Okorafor would write a solo title focused on Shuri. Broken Places & Outer Spaces, Okorafor’s first non-fiction title, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2019.
Nnedi Okorafor Influences and themes
Her novels and stories reflect both her West African heritage and her American life. Rather than identifying herself as a Nigerian-American, she refers herself as a “Naijamerican” and she explains the importance of her dual heritage during a 2016 NPR interview: That’s very much a part of my identity, and it’s also very much a reason why I think I ended up writing science fiction and fantasy because I live on these borders and these borders that allow me to see from multiple perspectives and kind of take things in and then kind of process certain ideas and certain stories in a very unique way.
And that has led me to write this strange fiction that I write, which really isn’t that strange if you really look at it through a sort of skewed lens. Nnedi noticed how fantasy the science fiction genres contain some little diversity, and some of this was her motivation for writing books of these genres set in Africa. She wanted to include more people to color and create stories of Africa because a few stories were set there.
She wrote her first story as a college sophomore and she made the setting of her story in Nigeria. Most of her stories place the black girls in important roles that are usually given to white characters. She cites Nigeria as “her muse” as she is influenced by Nigerian folklore and its rich mythology and mysticism. Gary K. Wolfe wrote her work: “Okorafor’s genius was to find the iconic images and traditions of African culture, mostly Nigerian and Igbo, and tweak them enough to become a seamless part of her vocabulary of fantastika.”
Nnedi’s work was to look at the “weighty social issues: racial and gender inequality, political violence, the destruction of the environment, genocide and corruption” through “the framework of fantasy.” She shared the themes of her stories which were often multi-layered and grounded in “stories of the women and girls around me and also within myself.” Okorafor asserts that her work and parental responsibility relate to each other because “writing and being a mother is a part of me, so they are mixed together and balance each other out.”
Nnedi Okorafor Who fears death
Who fears death is a science fantasy novel by Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor, published in 2010 by DAW, an imprint of Penguin Books. It was awarded the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, as well as the 2010 Carl Brandon Kindred Award “for an outstanding work of speculative fiction dealing with race and ethnicity.”
Nnedi Okorafor Lagoon
The lagoon is an African futurist novel by Nnedi Okorafor. It has drawn much scholarly attention since its publication. In 2014 it was chosen as an honor list title for the James Tiptree Jr. Award.
Nnedi Okorafor World Fantasy Award
Shortly after winning The World Fantasy Award in 2011, Okorafor published an essay “Lovecraft’s racism & The World Fantasy Award statuette, with comments from China Miéville”, in which she reflected her conflicting emotions on winning an award in the shape of a large silver bust of H.P. Lovecraft. Okorafor would later voice her support for Daniel José Older’s 2014 petition to replace the Lovecraft bust with one of Octavia Butler.
In this piece, she acknowledges both the literary legacy of Lovecraft and his continued influence in the contemporary world of science fiction: Do I want “The Howard” (the nickname for the World Fantasy Award statuette. The Lovecraft’s full name is “Howard Phillips Lovecraft”) that are replaced with the head of some other great writer? Maybe. Maybe it’s about that time. Maybe not.
What I know and want is to face the history of this leg of literature rather than put it aside or bury it away. If this is how some great minds of speculative fiction felt, then let’s deal with that … as opposed to mention it or explain it away.
Nnedi Okorafor Books
- Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected 2019
- LaGuardia 2019
- Antar: the Black Knight 2019
- Shuri: The Search For Black Panther 2019
- Shuri 2019
- Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #2: A Selection of Novellas 2019
- Binti: The Complete Trilogy 2019
- Binti (novel) 2015
- Who Fears Death 2010
- Binti: Home 2017
- The Book of Phoenix 2015
- Akata Warrior 2017
- Kabu Kabu 2013
Nnedi Okorafor Bibliography
Young Adult—writing as Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
- Zahrah the Windseeker (2005, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; paperback 2008, Graphia/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
- The Shadow Speaker (2007, Hyperion/Disney)
Children—writing as Nnedi Okorafor
- Long Juju Man (2009, Macmillan Africa)
- Iridessa and the Secret of the Never Mine (2012, Disney Books)
Young Adult—writing as Nnedi Okorafor
- Akata Witch (2011, Viking/Penguin) (Published as What Sunny Saw in the Flames in Nigeria and the UK by Cassava Republic Press)
- Akata Warrior (2017, Viking/Penguin/PRH) (Published as Sunny and the Mysteries of Osisi in Nigeria and the UK by Cassava Republic Press)
- The Man (to be published in Nigeria)
Adult—writing as Nnedi Okorafor
- Who Fears Death (2010, DAW/Penguin)
- “Hello, Moto” (2011, Tor.com)[43]
- “Moom!” short story in “AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers” (2012, Storytime)[44]
- Kabu Kabu (2013, Prime Books)
- “It’s War” short story in “Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History” (2014, Crossed Genres)
- Lagoon (2014, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.) (2015, Saga Press/Simon & Schuster)
- The Book of Phoenix (2015, DAW/Penguin/PRH) (prequel of Who Fears Death)
- Binti (2015, Tor.com)
- Binti 2: Home (2017, Tor.com)
- Binti: The Night Masquerade (2018, Tor.com)
- Remote Control (upcoming 2018, Hodder & Stoughton)
Nnedi Okorafor Awards
- 2005 – The Strange Horizons Reader’s Choice Award for Stephen King’s Super-Duper Magical Negroes
- 2007 – 2008 – Macmillan Writers’ Prize for Africa for Long Juju Man
- 2008 – Carl Brandon Parallax Award for The Shadow Speaker
- 2008 – The Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature for Zahrah the Windseeker
- 2012 – The 2012 Black Excellence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature (Fiction) for Zahrah the Windseeker
- 2012 – Kindred Award for Who Fears Death
- 2011 – The World Fantasy Award (Best Novel) for Who Fears Death
- 2016 – The Nebula Award (Best Novella) for Binti
- 2016 – Children’s Africana Book Award for Best Book for Young Readers for Chicken in the Kitchen
- 2016 – The Hugo Award for Best Novella for Binti
Frequently Asked Questions About Nnedi Okorafor
Who is Okorafor?
She is a Nigerian-American fantasy writer and science fiction and speculative fiction for both children and adults.
How old is Nnedi?
She is 45 years old as of 2019.
How tall is Okorafor?
She stands at an admirable height, As for now her height is under review but we will get to update the information soon as it is available.
Is Nnedi married?
She is not yet married but she is in a relationship.
How much is Okorafor worth?
She is a Nigerian-American fantasy writer and science fiction and speculative fiction who has an estimated net worth of $1 million dollars.
How much does Nnedi make?
She makes an admirable income from her career though she has not revealed the information to the public review.
Where does Okorafor live?
Is Nnedi dead or alive?
She is still alive and in good health.