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• Ghostroots: Stories - 2024 W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY

• 'Pemi Aguda website - https://pemiaguda.com/

  ’Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.

  Her writing has won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, a Tyson Prize for Fiction, Hopwood Awards, and the Writivism Prize. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship, a Juniper Summer Workshop scholarship, an Aspen Words Emerging Writer fellowship, and her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 Fiction Fellow with the Miami Book Fair, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, and is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine.

  W. W. Norton, Virago, and Masobe will publish her story collection, Ghostroots, and her novel, The Suicide Mothers.

  She is represented by Renée Zuckerbrot of MMQ Lit.

• Wikipedia -

  Pemi Aguda

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  'Pemi Aguda

  Aguda at the 2024 Texas Book Festival.
  Born Nigeria
  Citizenship Nigerian
  Education University of Michigan (MFA)
  Known for Ghostroots (2024)
  Awards Writivism Short Story Prize O'Henry Prize
  Website pemiaguda.com
  Pemi Aguda is a Nigerian writer known for her short stories and debut collection Ghostroots (2024). Her work often explores complex themes surrounding motherhood, identity, and the supernatural. Ghostroots, which includes previously-published stories such as "Breastmilk" and "The Hollow", was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and received critical acclaim for its unifying themes and narrative cohesion.

  Aguda's stories have been widely recognized, earning multiple accolades, including an O'Henry Award in 2022 for "Breastmilk" and again in 2023 for "The Hollow". Additionally, "Breastmilk" was shortlisted for the 2024 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her forthcoming novel, The Suicide Mothers, which won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Award, is slated for release in 2025.

  Education and fellowships
  'Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria, where she used to work in architecture.

  In 2015, she won the Writivism Short Story Prize and became the recipient of the first Writivism Stellenbosch University writing residency.[1][2] She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program, where she won a Henfield Prize, a Tyson Prize, and several Hopwood Awards.[3]

  A graduate of the 2019 Clarion Workshop, Aguda's work was supported by an Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. She also received a scholarship from the Juniper Summer Workshop (where she is now a faculty member in fiction) and an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship in 2020.[4] She was a 2021 Miami Book Fair Fiction Fellow,[5] a 2022 MacDowell Fellow in Literature,[6] and a 2023 James Merrill House Writer in Residence.[7]

  Career
  Aguda is known for short stories that often deal with the complexities of balancing motherhood (or fatherhood) between valor and oppression. The stories are wrapped in supernatural scenarios of literal hauntings or otherwise feature characters having haunting concerns that consume them, and each is normally connected in some way to the discussion of motherhood or womanhood as "a haunting and an inheritance".[8]

  There is a sense, amidst the magic, that mothers are doomed to fail. The world is full of dangers, and a mother can either smother or leave, and neither will do. Daughters can escape or stay, but the world very well might blame them either way.
  — Leah Rachel von Essen, Chicago Review of Books, on the short stories of Ghostroots

  In a discussion with Marris Adikwu on Interview, Aguda explained her ethos on and interpretation of storytelling as a type of expression of what haunts people, saying "almost every story could be read as a haunted story. As much as we're haunted by ghosts or our ancestors or evil, we're haunted by memory, too. We are haunted by repressed emotions [or] by the decisions that we don't make."[9] The recurring themes of literal and figurative haunting throughout her works culminated in the release of a debut short story collection.

  In May 2024, W. W. Norton published this debut short story collection, Ghostroots.[10] It contains previously-published award-winning content – such as "Breastmilk" and "The Hollow" – and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.[11] The unifying themes of these short stories helped to establish cohesion. Critics by and large viewed it as a strong short story collection and debut, though they were split on reception to some of the stories, such as "Birdwoman".[12][13][14][15] It was also listed on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2024.[16]

  Other than fiction writing, she also engages as editor of short-form content. She is currently the Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine.[17]

  Awards
  Year Title Award Category Result Ref
  2015 "Caterer, Caterer" Writivism Short Story Prize Short Fiction Won [18]
  2020 The Suicide Mothers early draft Deborah Rogers Foundation Award — Won [19][20][21]
  2022 "Breastmilk" O'Henry Award — Won [22]
  "Masquerade Season" Nommo Award Short Story Won [23]
  2023 "The Hollow" O'Henry Award — Won [24]
  2024 "Breastmilk" Caine Prize — Shortlisted [25]
  Ghostroots National Book Award Fiction Won [11]
  Works
  Books

  —— (2024). Ghostroots (hardcover 1st ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9781324065852.[10]
  —— (2025). The Suicide Mothers (hardcover 1st ed.). Little, Brown. ISBN 9780349018270.α
  Anthologies

  These Words Expose Us
  Lagos Noir
  Notes
  α Novel to be released on 6 May 2025[26]

• AFREADA - https://www.afreada.com/interviews/pemi-aguda

  ’Pemi Aguda
  In Conversation

  This week we spoke to ’Pemi Aguda about early roots, fitting a life around writing, and telling the stories of the city that raised her.
  Interviewed by Zulaikhah Agoro.

  ZA: When did this whole writing thing start? When was the seed planted? What was the special thing about writing that captured you at that stage?

  PA: I’ve been writing as long as I can remember! There’s an illustrated novel from when I was really young. (With hindsight, it was basically Enid Blyton fan fiction, complete with tea time in between mysteries.) It’s too far back now to know exactly what captured me, but like many writers, I was first a voracious reader. Perhaps I just wanted to keep the story going. Maybe that’s what makes writers—we want to keep the story going.

  ZA: Keep the story going, I have never heard it expressed like that but I totally agree. In 2020, your novel-in-progress The Suicide Mothers won the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and now your debut short story collection is out in the world! What was the journey to publication like for you? How does it feel to make your debut with Ghostroots?

  PA: I’ve been publishing short stories since I was in my late teens, first as little (cringe) missives on Facebook, then on the blogs where I had weekly fiction columns. Long before my first literary publication, long before my MFA, before any accolades, people—from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and other African countries—were reading and discussing my stories, and so part of the joy of Ghostroots is that I can share this book with those who’ve been so supportive for well over a decade! This collection is for all of us. That my stories get to find new readers is delicious frosting on the cake. It feels lucky and hard-won and inevitable all at the same time.

  ZA: Now I’d like to talk about Ghostroots in more detail. Tell us about these stories, how did they come into existence, and why are they so important to you?

  PA: It wasn’t until I had written several of these stories that I started to see they were interested in questions about family, about what we owe ourselves versus what we owe our community, and how we carry the weight of ancestry. Can we exist outside of the context of these ties? Should we? The themes didn’t come first, though. What came first were the “what if?” ideas: What if a last-born son watched a fever kill all the last-born sons on his street, watched death waltz towards him? What happens when a housegirl is kidnapped by a woman with good intentions? While writing into these ideas, my own preoccupations naturally made themselves manifest.

  ZA: There is one unifying and exciting character that runs through the core of this collection; Lagos. I am a little partial to the city so I will stop myself from running into effusive praise, but I’d like to ask you instead, why Lagos? Was it a means to spotlight the modern urban Nigerian experience, or did you have entirely different motivations?

  PA: Lagos, because Lagos raised me. That’s the simple answer. Lagos is what I know, and yet, Lagos is what I am baffled by. For me, this city offers the perfect balance between insight, or instinctual knowledge, and surprise. It helps that there are enough wild stories to keep anyone inspired. All you have to do is turn on the radio, and there’s some absurdity being stated as fact.

  ZA: On the note of the absurdity, I 100% concur! Getting to the technical side of the equation now, can you talk us through your writing process? What does it look like in a practical sense, and how do you balance it with your daily life?

  PA: My writing process differs drastically from story to story, story to novel. Mostly, I need to hold an idea in my head for a long time before attempting to write. To start before it has grounded might be to kill it. There are many carcasses in my folders. Sometimes, I’ll read poetry or a fiction passage as a way in, so that I’m inspired for my own work.

  As for daily life, even if it means writing on my phone while transiting between activities, I will find the time if I want to write. When I had a hectic job that refused to fit in the confines of a 9-6, I wrote at lunch breaks. That’s as practical as it gets: if I want to write, I will write.

  ZA: I like the bare-knuckles practicality of that; if one really wants to write, you will always find a way around to it. Still on the topic of craft and technique, as author of both a short story collection and a forthcoming novel, what differences do you perceive between the process of writing a short story versus long-form fiction? Which do you find more enjoyable?

  PA: I find both enjoyable in different ways. I think the biggest difference for me is scope and immersion. So far, writing a novel means that the book follows me through the rest of my life. Everything I see or eat or hear is refracted through the world of the novel. Whereas the short story feels more like a short cold plunge. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I write stories quickly, it just means that they are perhaps less sticky, less prone to attaching themselves to everything else.

  ZA: According to popular news, your debut novel The Suicide Mothers is coming out next year and I am already excited about that. Can you give us a brief snippet of what to expect in that new work?

  PA: Thank you! You can expect: Strangeness! Intrigue! More Lagos! Water! Women!

  ZA: More Lagos, yes!!! Finally, if you could give one piece of advice to aspiring authors, what would it be?

  PA: Read everything. Beyond your comfort zone. Beyond what’s popular. Beyond what’s new. Then, go write. (Here’s a bonus from my mum: watch your posture! Those hours of writing can be brutal on the spine.)

  ’Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
  Her writing has won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, a Tyson Prize for Fiction, Hopwood Awards, and the Writivism Prize. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship, a Juniper Summer Workshop scholarship, an Aspen Words Emerging Writer fellowship, and her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 Fiction Fellow with the Miami Book Fair, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, and is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine.

  You can read an excerpt of her debut collection, Ghostroots here.

• Concentrate - https://www.secondwavemedia.com/concentrate/features/pemiaguda0741.aspx

  U-M alum 'Pemi Aguda digs into uncanny elements of Nigerian life in new book
  Natalia Holtzman | Wednesday, September 11, 2024
  Share Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn Share through Email
  Author 'Pemi Aguda pictured with the cover of her new book, "Ghostroots."
  Author 'Pemi Aguda pictured with the cover of her new book, "Ghostroots."W.W. Norton and Company

  This story is part of a series about arts and culture in Washtenaw County. It is made possible by the Ann Arbor Art Center, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, Destination Ann Arbor, Larry and Lucie Nisson, and the University Musical Society.

  In her debut story collection, "Ghostroots," Nigerian-born writer ‘Pemi Aguda blends elements of the uncanny with the gritty mundanities of everyday life in Lagos, Nigeria.

  Aguda, who earned her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Michigan, will return to Ann Arbor on Sept. 20 at 6:30 p.m. for a reading at Literati Bookstore, where she’ll be joined by writer and U-M Professor Peter Ho Davies.

  In a recent phone call with Concentrate, Aguda said the stories that make up "Ghostroots" took shape over the course of seven or eight years.

  In one story, a mysterious fever claims the lives of the youngest sons from each family on a given street. In another, a house contorts itself to swallow whole each successive generation of men who are given to mistreating women.

  Aguda says it was only about five years into her writing process that she realized she "clearly had a preoccupation" with family dynamics — especially the relationships between mothers and daughters, and mothers and sons. She says she was also fascinated by embodiment – the "ways people live inside their bodies, [how they] live in their bodies in the context of the society they're in, [or how] people want to shed those bodies or feel weighed down by them."

  Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

  Q: It seems like a lot of the stories in this collection focus on the experiences of women — relationships between women, and especially those familial relationships you mentioned earlier. I wondered if you could tell me about why that subject draws your eye.

  A: I think in my early 20s, I was very concerned about being an individual in a very particular way and was realizing that I couldn't separate that sense of self from the people around me. I would see my mother interacting with my grandmother and see the ways that I was replicating some of their ideas and their patterns without necessarily thinking about it.

  I'm also somebody who didn't grow up going back to our family village. So there are all these people who came before my grandmother who I have no idea about, but then my mother might say something in passing about one of them that I realize is something that I currently do. A friend of mine described it as being epigenetically haunted. There's a way all these people who I've never even seen are still existing in my body, in my life.

  So I'm just very interested in the question of how much of me is me versus just a consequence of the place I come from, the people who I’ve come from, and how that connection can either feel grounding, like I have support, or it can feel like a trap, like how much of my own destiny can I create? I don't think there are any straight answers, obviously, but this is something that I think about — what we inherit and how we pass that on and what we owe ourselves.

  Q: You mentioned that these were issues you thought a lot about in your 20s. Do you find that you're less preoccupied with that question these days?

  A: I think the question has evolved. The novel I’m working on [now] is also [about] a specific mother-daughter relationship. The daughter leaves her mother and is trying to start her own life in the city. So in some ways I'm still thinking about these things, but the way I'm thinking about them has changed. It no longer feels like such a binary between individual and community the way it [used to]. I think a part of me has accepted that these things can be separated, and the question might have evolved to see what happens after that. What happens after that acceptance?

  Q: There’s a blurb from Kelly Link that I thought really nicely describes the atmosphere of the book, where she says "the everyday strangeness of life and the uncanny rub up against each other." I wondered if you could tell me about your interest in those two forces and how that interest has been playing out in your writing.

  A: So I grew up in Lagos, right? And I think that Nigerians talk about the supernatural in a very mundane manner. There are people I know personally who’ll tell you how, ‘Oh, when I was 13 and I was walking home from school, somebody said something to me, and then I lost myself, and then I recovered myself like two hours later, and I'd given them all my family's property,’ or something. Or someone told me about somebody who went to visit her fiance's family and realized that they were trying to kill her — to eat her. These stories are told in this very straightforward way, and the truth is that there's a part of this definition that seems to come from outside of our culture.

  Sometimes when people describe the work as otherworldly, it becomes a question of what your baseline of reality is. Because if we have different ideas of what reality is, then [our] ideas of [the] supernatural are very different. I think a lot of my stories interact with the strange in a way that the tone isn't necessarily, ‘Oh, this is a strange thing.’ It's more matter of fact. I think there's an interesting tension between the tone of a story being matter of fact, and then things happening at this higher register. When you take things down to just, like, ‘Oh, this is mundane. This is natural,’ I think there's more space for people to enter strangeness without their hackles being risen.

• Interview - https://www.interviewmagazine.com/literature/in-her-new-story-collection-author-pemi-aguda-invites-readers-for-a-haunting

  In Her New Story Collection, Author Pemi
  Aguda Invites Readers For a Haunting
  By Marris Adikwu
  Photographed by IfeOluwa Nihinlola
  May 15, 2024
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  Pemi Aguda
  Pemi Aguda, photographed by IfeOluwa Nihinlola.

  Pemi Aguda’s stories stay with you long after you’ve read the last word. In her fictional world, toxic energy seeps into a newborn through breast milk, chaotic behavior is the sole remedy for recurring pimples, and an unhappy woman morphs into a strange bird. Such bizarre scenarios come to life in Aguda’s debut collection of stories, Ghostroots. Set in a mystical version of her native Lagos, these tales merge the supernatural with the mundane and imagine how the horrors of womanhood are passed down through generations.

  Growing up with limited knowledge of her own family history, Aguda reflects on what it means to not know who or what came before you. Ghostroots, she explains, is her way of exploring the ways in which one’s history lives with them and manifests in ways they may not realize. Between conflicting time zones, I got on Zoom with the author to discuss the appeal of being haunted, fielding comparisons to Nollywood films, and the inspiration she finds within the wild world of Lagos.

  ———

  MARRIS ADIKWU: It’s cool that we’re doing this interview on International Women’s Day.

  PEMI AGUDA: Oh, yeah.

  ADIKWU: You tend to write complex women into your stories. I found out about your work right after you won the Writivism Prize for “Caterer, Caterer,” and I remember being so fascinated by how you infused humor into what would’ve been such an otherwise gory story. So, I have to ask, what’s behind your fascination with haunting stories?

  AGUDA: Do you consider “Caterer, Caterer” to be a haunting story?

  ADIKWU: I guess so. It was pretty funny, but it also had some haunting parts.

  AGUDA: I don’t disagree. I love a good haunted story. I love a good ghost story. Actually, I was telling my university students the other day that almost every story could be read as a haunted story. As much as we’re haunted by ghosts or our ancestors or evil, we’re haunted by memory, too. We are haunted by repressed emotions, by the decisions that we don’t make, and I love that the mood of a story can express what the character cannot express. So, when I start writing, I just naturally go in that direction.

  ADIKWU: How much do you actually believe in the presence of the supernatural in real life?

  AGUDA: Oof. In real life, I keep telling people that I am waiting to be haunted. I want to be haunted. I would love a moment where my whole reality feels shifted, where a “before and after” mark is introduced: before I saw a ghost and after I have seen a ghost. I have not experienced ghosts personally, but perhaps my stories are an invitation to them.

  ADIKWU: What role does humor have in your work?

  AGUDA: Actually, I don’t think about humor a lot when I write. When people tell me that something was funny, it’s always a surprise to me. I don’t necessarily consider myself a funny person. If there’s any humor, it’s always inadvertent as opposed to deliberate. But I have friends who are really great storytellers, and the way that they frame sentences, the way they frame narratives and keep me asking, “What happened next? What happened next?” I try to assimilate that and have that propulsion reflected in my work.

  ADIKWU: Since “Caterer, Caterer,” you’ve gone on to tell stories with mystery, horror, magical realism. You’ve been able to master the art of combining elements of the supernatural with mundane reality. How has your work evolved?

  AGUDA: That’s a great question. I think that what I have been reading has changed over the years. The things I’m reading have changed, and I’ve grown up, too, moving across the world, meeting new people—all of these end up changing fiction, right? As I’ve changed, my fiction has changed, and over time my idea of what is good fiction has kept broadening and broadening.

  ADIKWU: There is so much fiction from Nigeria centered around mystical themes, and they’re told in very elaborate ways in film and in prose. How have you been able to develop your own distinct style?

  AGUDA: When I was 20, I wrote a short story, and one of the comments was, “Oh, wow. This feels very Nollywood!” I was very upset, and it took me a long time to understand why, at the time, I didn’t think that that was a compliment. Even though I now think that there’s space for the melodramatic and for exaggeration, I am more attracted to subtlety. Especially when introducing elements of the supernatural, it’s important that the reader feels grounded. Does that make sense? So, I believe in subtlety, and I believe in a grounded entry so that when the world shifts, it feels both inevitable and surprising at the same time.

  ADIKWU: Let’s talk about your upcoming story collection, Ghostroots. Congratulations, by the way. The stories are set in a re-imagined version of Lagos, where characters fight for freedom from ancestral ties. What was the inspiration behind these stories and why Lagos specifically?

  AGUDA: Well, why Lagos is a simple answer. That’s where I grew up. That’s what I know. I spent most of my life in Lagos. It’s a wild city, but it truly inspires me. As for what inspired the stories? You talk about the stories being about people who are vying for distance from ancestral ties. I was one of those people who did not know much about my family history growing up. My parents didn’t think it was necessary for us to know some things, or go back to their villages. Over time, I got really jealous of friends who could trace their ancestry back, I don’t know, seven generations. A friend of mine was calling her great-grandmother’s “Oriki” and I felt really envious of that connection. So, some of these stories are writing into that gap, that absence, and asking what it means to not know who came before those who came before you. But on the other hand, I find myself doing and saying things that are so reflective of my mother and my grandmother, so even though I don’t know this history personally, it feels like this history is living with me in ways that I might not realize. I think that some of these stories are written into that unknowing.

  ADIKWU: That makes sense. What’s next for you?

  AGUDA: The project I’m currently working on is not very magical, actually. If there’s anything supernatural, it’s more in language than changing realities. But it’s still about women. I am thinking a lot about Christianity and the boxes that young women are put in because of the culture of Christianity in Nigeria particularly. Specifically, what situations like that can do to a young woman’s sense of self. That’s what I’m thinking about.

• afrocritik - https://www.afrocritik.com/pemi-aguda-longlisted-2024-national-book-awards/

  Pemi Aguda’s “Ghostroots” Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Awards
  September 16, 2024
  Pemi Aguda

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  Nadia Davids Wins the 2024 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing
  Pemi Aguda’s short-story collection, Ghostroots, was nominated in the Fiction category of National Book Awards.

  By Hope Ibiale

  Nigerian writer, Pemi Aguda, has been longlisted for the 2024 National Book Awards. Aguda’s work, Ghostroots, was nominated in the Fiction category. Other longlisted authors in this category include Kaveh Akbar, Jessica Anthony, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Percival Everett, Miranda July, Rachel Kushner, Hisham Matar, Sam Sax, and Tony Tulathimutte.

  Pemi Aguda
  Pemi Aguda
  The book award is divided into the Non-fiction category, Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Fiction, and Poetry. The finalists for each category will be announced on October 1 and the overall winners will be announced on November 20 at the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner. Each winner will receive a prize of $10,000, while each finalist will receive a prize of $1,000.

  Ghostroots
  Ghostroots
  The judges for the Fiction category this year are Jamie Ford, the author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet; Lauren Groff, a three-time National Book Award Finalist for Fiction; Zeyn Joukhadar, the author of The Map of Salt and Stars; Chawa Magaña, the steward of Palabras Bilingual Bookstore; and Reginald McKnight, the author of He Sleeps.

  Longlist books for the National Book Award
  Longlist books for the 2024 National Book Awards
  While announcing on her X page, Aguda commented, “What? How? Reeling! So thankful! Thank you, thank you! The judges, my editors, Renee, every magazine that pubbed these stories! Unbelievable that Ghostroots is in such stellar company”.

  See Also
  Samson Dauda
  News
  Samson Dauda Wins the 2024 Mr. Olympia
  Pemi Aguda is a Nigerian writer, architect, and podcast host. She has won awards like the Writivism Short Story Prize, the O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction, the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and many others. Her works have been published in Omenana Magazine, Kalahari Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and other places. She has also been shortlisted for the AKO 2024 Caine Prize for African Writing. Aguda’s book, Ghostroots, is her debut short story collection. Her next work, The Suicide Mothers, will be released soon.

Aguda, 'Pemi. Ghostroots: Stories. Norton. May 2024. 224p. ISBN 9781324065852.

$26.99. HORROR

DEBUT In this debut collection, Aguda, winner of the O. Henry Prize for short fiction, makes her home city of Lagos the star, bringing the place and its inhabitants to life. The 12 thought-provoking speculative stories, featuring mostly women protagonists, a strong narrative voice, and a focus on the unsettling results of generational divides, lay bare the universal human experience, illuminating the menace that constantly lurks just below the surface. The first story, "Manifest," follows a young woman who might be possessed by the ghost of her grandmother, superbly setting the uncanny tone that defines the entire volume. Other standouts include "The Hollow," in which an architect attempts to renovate a house that holds generations of secrets in its walls; "24, Alhaji Williams Street," where a fever is killing each youngest son on a single street, one address at a time; and "Bird-woman," a tale that is as upsetting as it is beautiful. VERDICT Aguda's excellent story collection deserves a wide audience. With a breadth similar to the critically acclaimed fackal, fackal by Tobi Ogundiran, this will also appeal to readers of Eugen Bacon, Lisa Turtle, and Karen Russell.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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"Ghostroots: Stories." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 4, Apr. 2024, p. 82. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788954026/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a2725d8f. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.

Aguda, 'Pemi GHOSTROOTS Norton (Fiction None) $26.99 5, 7 ISBN: 9781324065852

Ghosts appear in many unexpected forms in the supernatural landscape of Lagos.

Nigerian writer Aguda opens her debut collection with "Manifest," the tale of a relationship that becomes contentious when a woman recognizes her own mother in her daughter's face. Many of the book's ghosts are passed down through maternal lineages, and it seems that hauntings are reserved mostly for women. In "Breastmilk," Aduke is more haunted by her mother's fighting legacy--one she has betrayed by forgiving her husband Timi's infidelity so easily--than she is by Timi's betrayal. "Imagine Me Carrying You" follows another mother-daughter pair; the mother, haunted by a tragic car accident, becomes a listless and aggressive shell of a person her daughter must pause her own life to attend to. In "Girlie," a daughter whose mother has sent her away to work must confront the ghost of her mother's love after being kidnapped by the woman she buys tomatoes from at the market, while "The Wonders of the World" finds young Abisola on an extended school trip, where the intervention of her strange classmate Zeme finally helps her feel sure of her parents' love. The stories that center the cowardice of male characters produce some of the book's most delightful twists and strongest narrative structures. In one of the most notable stories, "The Hollow," an architect named Arit visits the home of Madam Oni, a client, to find it constantly transformed by the abusive spirits of Madam's son, husband, and father-in-law. In "Things Boys Do," the lives of three different men converge when they discover they are connected through a tragic childhood incident. The collection builds slowly, finding its emotional stride in the second half, when the characters' interiorities are more developed and complex. The setting of mythical Lagos also shimmers more energetically in the collection's later stories.

A satisfying slow build featuring haunted family relationships.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Aguda, 'Pemi: GHOSTROOTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A789814664/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d2756bc7. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.

Nov. 19'Pemi Aguda leads something of a double life. She handles front-desk duties at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, the venerable architectural library, museum, and archive on Washington Square. She is also writing stories, winning literary prizes, and has emerged as a "major voice in speculative fiction," as the New York Times recently declared.

This week, the Nigerian-born Philadelphian's profile may grow exponentially. Aguda's Ghostroots is one of five fiction finalists for the coveted National Book Award, whose winner is to be announced Wednesday night in New York.

Also a finalist this year (in nonfiction) is veteran journalist and poet Eliza Griswold, a longtime Philadelphian though currently a Princeton resident whose Circle of Hope chronicles the unraveling of a Philadelphia church. Winners receive a $10,000 prize.

Ghostroots is Aguda's first book, which is just one reason no one was more surprised by the National Book Award honor than the author herself. For another, she didn't know that the National Book Foundation had expanded eligibility requirements beyond U.S. citizens and those seeking citizenship to include authors whose "primary, long-term home" is in the U.S.

"And so in a way, I was just shocked, because I hadn't paid attention because I didn't even think that it was a possibility," said Aguda, 34, last week.

She was shocked, too, since the collection of stories is so specifically Nigerian. "It's nice to know that there are themes that are universal enough that people were interested."

Interested, for sure, but haunted is perhaps more to the point. Aguda straddles worlds corporeal and spirit, and plays with the sense of what's real and the reality that exists only in a character's head. In "Manifest," a girl becomes increasingly possessed by the evil spirit of her late grandmother. Feminist ideals mingle with self-doubt in "Breastmilk." "24, Alhaji Williams Street" tells the story of teenage boys living on the same street struck down one by one by a mysterious fever.

"Wildly inventive and odd, but written with surgeonlike precision," wrote Gabino Iglesias in the Times' May list of "most chilling" new releases.

Horror? Mythology? Speculative fiction?

Aguda says she leaves the question of genre to others, but she doesn't "feel strongly about any of those [terms] in a negative way. I do think that sometimes the genre of horror harms, because when you say something is horror, you tend to come to it expecting to be terrified. But I don't know that my work does that exactly. I think if there's any kind of horror, it's more in the subtle end of things, maybe more unsettling than actually horrifying."

In person, Aguda is soft-spoken, sincere, and a deep listener, and she peppers the conversation with humor. She was born in the Nigerian state of Ondo, raised in Lagos, and had a career in architecture before moving to the U.S. to study at the University of Michigan, where she earned an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program. She has won the O. Henry Prize, and her novel The Suicide Mothers is set to be published in 2026 by W.W. Norton, London feminist publisher Virago, and Nigerian publisher Masobe Books.

After graduate school, Aguda looked for a place to live that was "somewhere affordable, somewhere literary," and friends invited her to Philadelphia. She walked around the city and settled on West Philadelphia.

"I liked all the art. The people looked interesting and everybody was chill. I was like, 'OK, I can make it work.' I think it's OK to pick a place and decide to love it as opposed to go into it because you love it."

Ghostroots came together as a collection when Aguda reviewed stories she had written over a number of years, and noticed a theme.

"I remember somebody in my MFA [program] saying that there were lots of dysfunctional families in my stories. And I was very surprised by that diagnosis, but looking back, I think there are interesting family dynamics."

At the time, in her early to mid-20s, she was thinking a lot about "what we inherit and what we pass on and the history that's inaccessible to us."

Her own history now includes a place far from her origins, and yet she's not expecting Philadelphia to show up in her writing anytime soon.

"I think so far all my preoccupations or just all the things I'm interested in have been so steeped in Nigeria and its culture. And I think once I start writing about America, it will show that my center has shifted."

In any case, the fantastical will continue.

"I love reading fiction where strange things happen. So strange things will always happen in my fiction because I delight in reading it, and I think there's something true that can be revealed when realities are askew."

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"Philadelphian 'Pemi Aguda is up for one of the nation's biggest literary prizes." Philadelphia Inquirer [Philadelphia, PA], 19 Nov. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A816740023/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8a6e5b86. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.

"Ghostroots: Stories." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 4, Apr. 2024, p. 82. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788954026/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a2725d8f. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024. "Aguda, 'Pemi: GHOSTROOTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A789814664/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d2756bc7. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024. "Philadelphian 'Pemi Aguda is up for one of the nation's biggest literary prizes." Philadelphia Inquirer [Philadelphia, PA], 19 Nov. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A816740023/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8a6e5b86. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.

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