Arrö-yo was from earth but Zahrah was from Ginen. She was a young girl who was nothing like Arrö-yo, except that she, too, was a windseeker. I have stories and they are all connected and each story is more of the puzzle I’m putting together for myself. I’d written another book called The Legend of Arrö-yo which was about a woman who could fly, a windseeker named Arrö-yo. When I finished the novel Ginen, I still wanted to spend time in that world. I even wrote a field guide to keep track. In that novel, I detailed Ginen-the people, the cultures, the advanced plant technology, the bloated overly patriarchal chief, his miserable wives, and of course the forests and their flora and fauna, there was so much in that novel. This world came to me long before Zahrah the Windseeker. Ginen-an entire planet populated with foliage. Zahrah the Windseeker started with a place. I’m not a perfect fit anywhere.įrom what seed or seeds did your novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, grow? And can you share the story of its cultivation? When you look out on the literary landscape, where do you see yourself? Her short story, “ From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7” appeared in the May 2009 issue of Clarkesworld.īelow, Okorafor and I talk about urban grasshoppers and a girl who chooses to do it on her own. Her chapter book Iridessa and the Fire-Bellied Dragon Frog (Disney Press) is also scheduled for release next year. Okorafor’s novels Who Fears Death (DAW) and Akata Witch (Penguin) are due out in 2010. When I’m writing, I’m there and I enjoy being there.” The creatures really do bite, snarl, sing, spit, sting, etc.

I’ve felt the sting of their sand storms and smelled their forests. “When a story comes to me, I have to write it or it won’t let me rest,” Okorafor said. Okorafor is a spontaneous writer who writes with urgency, and as a result her stories read like magical evocations of living beings.

Reviews of her writing praise her courageous female characters and her breath-taking descriptions. I love those kinds of things.”įor good reason, Okorafor’s fiction has been called “highly original” and “endlessly imaginative.” Her work has been favorably compared to that of Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson for her deft blending of contemporary and traditional themes and forms. A mosque made of glass and solar cells which blooms with fragrant periwinkle daisies on its roof at midnight every night. Sparkling lizards that can infest a house giving it unlimited electricity but also the problem of constant static. An enormous wormlike creature moving beneath the sands who is obsessed with the number ten, not the typical numbers of seven, one, or three. “I enjoy nonsense and weirdness,” Okorafor said. Her writing is beautiful, relentlessly weird, and utterly engrossing. Nnedi Okorafor is the award-winning author of Zahrah the Windseeker, The Shadow Seeker, and Long Juju Man.

The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor