Akwaeke Emezi Books in Order

Akwaeke Emezi was born in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigeria. They are an Igbo and Tamil writer, visual artist, and musician whose work moves between novels, young adult fiction, memoir, poetry, film, painting, and ritual objects. Their art often considers embodiment, ritual, and the meeting point of the physical and spirit worlds.

Before their first novel, Emezi was already making art in several forms. They moved to Brooklyn in the early 2010s as a poet, painter, and filmmaker; their experimental short Ududeagu won Best Short Experimental at the 2014 BlackStar Film Festival. In 2017, they received a Global Arts Fund grant for The Unblinding and won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa for “Who Is Like God.”

The novels arrived fast, but the visual work never fell away.

Their 2018 debut, Freshwater, brought many of those interests together. It follows Ada, a young Nigerian woman whose life is shaped by separate selves and Igbo spiritual ideas, first in Nigeria and later in the United States. The novel draws on parts of Emezi’s own realities, and it led to their selection as a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.

It made clear that identity, spirit, and the body would remain central concerns.

Emezi writes for teen readers as directly as they write for adults. Pet takes place in Lucille, a supposedly safe city where a trans girl named Jam learns that monsters have not vanished after all; it was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Its companion, Bitter, turns back to Lucille’s earlier protests and follows an artist trying to decide what she owes a movement. These books ask big questions about safety and justice while staying close to friendship, family, and art.

In The Death of Vivek Oji, Emezi returns to southeastern Nigeria for an intimate story of a family trying to understand its child after a devastating loss. Their romance You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty follows visual artist Feyi Adekola as grief and new desire collide. Together, the books show Emezi’s interest in close relationships, queer lives, complicated families, and people trying to make room for themselves.

They also write nonfiction and poetry. Dear Senthuran, a memoir in letters, deals with creativity, relationships, gender, the body, and survival; it received the 2022 Stonewall Book Award for Nonfiction. In Content Warning: Everything, poems move between homesickness, desire, abuse, chosen family, grief, and survival.

More recent work keeps changing the frame. Little Rot is a tense one-weekend story set in the shadowy upper reaches of a Nigerian city, while Somadina follows a girl with frightening powers searching for her missing twin in a magical West African world. In 2024, Emezi released their debut EP, Stop Dying, You Were Very Expensive!, and in 2025 published the paranormal romance Son of the Morning.

They continue to work across writing, film, visual art, and music. Emezi has described themselves as based in liminal spaces, a fitting phrase for an artist who keeps making room for stories that refuse easy categories.