BROUGHT TO BOOK NNEDI OKORAFOR
NNEDI OKORAFOR
Close to home: the American writer discusses her most personal novel
Words by Jonathan Wright
Portrait by Zbigniew Bzdak
THE WORD META, MEANING SELF-referential, has become overused in popular discourse of late. So much so thatSFXapologises when using the term to describe Nnedi Okorafor’s remarkable new novel,Death Of The Author. Not to worry. “It does apply,” she says. “When I describe the book, I say that it’sself-aware.”
In part here, she’s referring to the book’s structure, which is split between two narratives. One, set in something like our own present day, stars Zelu, a paraplegic Nigerian-American who (in Okorafor’s blunt description) we meet when she’s busy becoming “a failed novelist and, basically, a failed professor”. With her life falling apart, Zelu writes a science fiction novel set in a post-human future, Rusted Robots. The book becomes “its own phenomena”, a bestseller that transforms Zelu’s fortunes.