Remarkable and daring.… Poetic and disturbing.… Rooting Ada’s story in Igbo cosmology forces us to further question our paradigm for what causes mental illness and how it manifests. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, including Granta. She won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa. Born and raised in Nigeria, she received her MPA from New York University and was awarded a 2015 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. Currently-lives in Brooklyn, New York CityĪkwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and artist based in liminal spaces.Awards-Commonwealth Short Story Prize-Africa.Unsettling, heart-wrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice. Written with stylistic brilliance and based in the author’s realities, this raw and extraordinary debut explores the metaphysics of identity and being, plunging the reader into the mysteries of self. When Ada travels to America for college, a traumatic event crystallizes the selves into something more powerful.Īs Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these alters-now protective, now hedonistic-move into control, Ada’s life spirals in a dangerous direction. Born "with one foot on the other side," she begins to develop separate selves. Her parents successfully prayed her into existence, but something must have gone awry, as the young Ada becomes a troubled child, prone to violent fits of anger and grief.īut Ada turns out to be more than just volatile. As an infant in southern Nigeria, she is a source of deep concern to her family.
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