Irenosen Okojie

Irenosen Okojie is a writer and poet. She was born in Nigeria and her family moved to the United Kingdom when she was eight years old. She holds a degree in Communication and Visual Culture from the London Metropolitan University. Her debut work, Butterfly Fish (Jacaranda Books, 2014), won a Betty Trask Award. Her short stories have been published in The New York Times, The Observer and The Guardian, and the awards she has won include the 2017 Salt’s Best British Short Stories, Kwani? and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. Ben Okri introduced her as a talented author with dynamic writing at the London Short Story Festival and ES Magazine described her as one of London’s new and most exciting literary voices. Her collection of short stories, Speak Gigantular (Jacaranda Books, 2016), was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Saboteur Award. Her prose stands out for a descriptive richness that evokes magical realism, always informed by her condition as an immigrant. In 2018, she became a member of the Royal Society of Literature.