‘Pemi Aguda
“None of us are free, but I hope the lesson is that it’s always worth it to try. Even if freedom doesn’t taste like you expected. In fiction, trapping a character pushes the repressed to the surface, forces them to look—at the world, at themselves.”
“Pemi Aguda’s intricately layered debut novel, One Leg on Earth, starts with a pregnant woman’s suicide. It’s everything a cold open should be — striking, powerful — but also more. Aguda, whose 2024 short-story collection Ghostroots was a finalist for the National Book Award, fills the scene with dazzling imagery that conjures beautifully. The pregnant woman brings her beaming face to the window,’gap-tooth a narrow darkness in an otherwise white smile. She turns her head, “clavicle bared to her husband’s confused gaze. Then she’s gone, leaping joyfully from a bridge into the water below ‘like a child jumping into the beloved arms of a parent.”….This is where all that had been irresistibly strange in the novel — the dreadfulness of Omi City; Yosoye’s nightmarish inability to keep Lagos out of her body — tips expertly into true folk horror. Folklore, which holds a mirror to a community’s anxieties, often reflects back a monster, turning a complex threat into something more easily observed and understood. In Aguda’s enormously capable hands, Yosoye is transformed from an ordinary young woman into a kind of figurative folk monster — her pregnant body a symbol so powerfully and aggressively human that it mocks the distorted narratives that deny humanity to those born on the wrong side of a gate.”
“‘Pemi Aguda’s novel “One Leg on Earth” (Norton) ought to bring this strikingly original writer a big new audience of readers. Aguda, who previously worked as an architect in Nigeria (she now lives in Philadelphia), sets her book amid the restless growth of a burgeoning Lagos, where a young pregnant woman confronts both ancient and modern dangers as she learns of a series of unexplained deaths. A vivid and fearless novel.”
“Aguda delivers a clear-eyed exploration of daughterhood, community, and the human costs of urban development, powered by an immersive portrait of a woman wrestling with the question of whom and what she’s willing to sacrifice for the life she wants. This is unforgettable. ”
“ ‘Pemi Aguda is a daring writer like no other, with a voice that is unique and powerful. One Leg on Earth is a sharp, funny, bold, nuanced, and utterly absorbing debut I did not know I needed. I will read anything ‘Pemi Aguda writes!”
“A portrait of a woman, a city, and a shared moment in time, and a story about how it feels when the changes in life are intertwined with bigger, scarier changes in the world outside. One Leg on Earth gripped me from the first page.”
“Wildly inventive and odd, but written with surgeonlike precision, these stories herald the arrival of a major voice in speculative fiction.”
“Ghostroots is a gorgeous inflection point in fabulism. Set in Lagos, at the confluence of tradition and wonder, the speculative currents of these stories pull you beneath the surface of contemporary Nigerian society, carrying you to a deeper place where the laws of literary physics no longer apply. ’Pemi Aguda’s razor-sharp collection will haunt you and leave you feeling unmoored.”
“Aguda’s excellent story collection deserves a wide audience.”
‘Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. Her most recent book is the critically acclaimed novel One Leg on Earth (W.W. Norton & Co. 2026). She is also the author of the story collection Ghostroots (W.W. Norton & Co, 2024), a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award.
Her short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, and the Writivism Prize. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship, 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.
In an interview with with Afreada, she was asked how the stories in Ghostroots came about and why they were important to her: “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.”
She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and lives in Philadelphia.
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