“What better time to listen to a story than when the world is about to end?”

—Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author

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Nnedi Okorafor’s brilliant, galaxy-spanning stories have earned some of speculative fiction’s most prestigious awards. Her visionary writing resonates across genres, from comics, screenplays, and short fiction to works for young readers. Now, with Death of the Author, Okorafor ventures into literary fiction while still keeping African futurism at the center of her work—and the results are extraordinary, called “spellbinding” by Zakiya Dalila Harris in the New York Times.

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At the center of Okorafor’s inventive new novel is Zelu, a frustrated novelist who ventures on a whim (and a haze of pot smoke) into the world of science fiction—and winds up with a publishing contract beyond any aspiring novelist’s wildest dreams. Her novel, Rusted Robots, is set in a postapocalyptic Lagos, where a humanoid robot named Ankara learns a terrible secret that could destroy the entire damaged and vulnerable world. Throughout both narratives—wound together in an inventive novel-within-a-novel structure—Okorafor pays tribute to the human capacity for creation and the essential power of story.

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Join Litquake and Museum of the African Diaspora for a memorable event celebrating Okorafor’s spectacular new work of fiction. Okorafor will be in conversation with writer Faith Adiele at this free event, followed by a book signing; reservations are strongly encouraged and include the option to pre-order a copy of Death of the Author.

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Nnedi Okorafor is the author of multiple award-winning and New York Times bestselling series including Binti and Who Fears Death, currently in development at HBO with George R.R. Martin. She has won every major prize in speculative fiction, including the World Fantasy, Nebula, Eisner, and multiple Hugo awards, as well as general honors such as the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. Born in Cincinnati to Igbo Nigerian immigrant parents, she now resides in Phoenix, Arizona, with her daughter Anyaugo.

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Faith Adiele co-founded and hosts MoAD’s African Book Club, and her monthly column for Detour: Best Stories in Black Travel is syndicated in The Miami Herald. An award-winning memoirist, she contributes to the CALM app, HBO-Max, Alta Magazine, Hyperallergic, and others, and her recent work has received Emmy and SoCal Journalism Award nominations. Faith graduated from Harvard College and the University of Iowa’s Writing Workshop and Nonfiction Writing programs. A set of hybrid chapbooks about her Nigerian-Nordic-American family were recently published by Texas Review Press and a travel writing craft guide from Columbia University Press. She lives in Oakland and chairs the Writing & Literature program at California College for the Arts.