Akwaeke Emezi

Emezi is Igbo and Tamil, born in Umuahia, and works across forms that publishers generally prefer to keep apart: literary fiction, books for teenagers, memoir, poetry and romance. Freshwater is narrated partly by the spirits its protagonist understands herself to contain, an ogbanje account of a self rather than a psychiatric one, and Emezi has described their own life in those terms. Dear Senthuran is a memoir in letters addressed to friends and lovers, and is blunt about money, surgery and ambition in a way that memoirs usually are not. You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty is a straightforward romance about a widowed artist, written deliberately after the harder books. They use they and them.