31 Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki - A Story of Empowerment

Today’s guest is Donald Oghenechovwe Ekpeki, a speculative fiction author from Nigeria. He has been awarded an honorable mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, twice. His short story “The Witching Hour,” won the 2018 Nommo award for best short story by an African. He was longlisted for the 2019 Nommo award and the 2020 British Science Fiction Association award. He was also awarded the 2020 Horror Writers Association diversity grant and was nominated for best novella by the Nebula Awards.

I usually don’t give you a list of a guest’s accomplishments, but in this case it is relevant. We’ve talked in this podcasts with guests about the way the American and British SF&F world keeps out authors from other countries, about how so much SF&F gets lost by never being noticed in the world, and I guess you know that there is a lot of inherent racism towards Africans. But whatever we know, whatever we assume, Donald shows us in this interview today many of the ways that African writers are cut off from the rest of the world, from self-publishing, from the big publishers, and more.

You can find Donald on:
Website: https://odekpeki.com/
Twitter: Twitter.com/@penprince_

Also check out the books he edited that we talked about: 'The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2021)' and 'Dominion’.

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