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After winning just about every major science fiction and fantasy award, Nnedi Okorafor explores a traumatic event in her own history in her most autobiographical novel yet.
Nnedi Okorafor began to write when she woke up in a hospital bed unable to walk. Credit… Akilah Townsend for The New York Times Published Jan. 12, 2025 Updated Jan. 13, 2025
When Nnedi Okorafor was 19, she woke up disoriented in a hospital room. Fluorescent pink and green grasshoppers and praying mantises bounced around her hospital bed, making strange clicks. An enormous crow threw itself against the window, trying to break in.
Once she was no longer hallucinating from pain medication, though, things got stranger and scarier: She tried to get out of bed, and found she couldn’t move her legs. Okorafor soon learned that she was paralyzed from the waist down from nerve damage that occurred during back surgery for scoliosis.
A star athlete and pre-med college student, Okorafor lost her faith in medicine, and felt alienated from her own body. “It was a death of who I was going to be,” she said of the paralysis. It was also a rebirth of sorts.
She retreated into her imagination, and from her hospital bed started sketching a story about a Nigerian woman who didn’t need to walk because she could fly. Later, after she had regained most of the sensation in her legs, learned to walk again and returned to college, she enrolled in writing classes.
Thirty years and more than 20 books later, Okorafor, now an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer, is exploring that traumatic experience, and the transformation that followed, in her heavily autobiographical new novel, “Death of the Author.”
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