Philadelphian ‘Pemi Aguda is up for one of the nation’s biggest literary prizes

‘Pemi Aguda leads something of a double life. She handles front-desk duties at the Atheneum of Philadelphia, the venerable architectural library, museum, and archive on Washington Square. She is also writing stories, winning literary prizes, and has emerged as a “major voice in speculative fiction,” as the New York Times recently declared.

This week, the Nairobi-born Philadelphian’s profile may grow exponentially. Aguda’s Ghostroots is one of five fiction finalists for the coveted National Book Award, whose winner is to be announced Wednesday night in New York.

Also a finalist this year (in non-fiction) is veteran journalist and poet Eliza Griswold, a longtime Philadelphian — though currently a Princeton resident — whose Circle of Hope chronicles the unraveling of a Philadelphia church. Winners receive a $10,000 prize.

Ghostroots is Aguda’s first book, which is just one reason no one was more surprised by the National Book Award honor than the author herself. For another, she didn’t know that the National Book Foundation had expanded eligibility requirements beyond U.S. citizens and those seeking citizenship to include authors whose “primary, long-term home” is in the U.S.

“And so in a way, I was just shocked, because I hadn’t paid attention because I didn’t even think that it was a possibility,” said Aguda, 34, last week.

She was shocked, too, since the collection of stories is so specifically Nigerian. “It’s nice to know that there are themes that are universal enough that people were interested.”

Interested, for sure, but haunted is perhaps more to the point. Aguda straddles worlds corporeal and spirit, and plays with the sense of what’s real and the reality that exists only in a character’s head. In “Manifest,” a girl becomes increasingly possessed by the evil spirit of her late grandmother. Feminist ideals mingle with self-doubt in “Breastmilk.” “24, Alhaji Williams Street” tells the story of teenage boys living on the same street struck down one by one by a mysterious fever.

“Wildly inventive and odd, but written with surgeonlike precision,” wrote Gabino Iglesias in the Times’ May list of “most chilling” new releases.

Horror? Mythology? Speculative fiction?

Aguda says she leaves the question of genre to others, but she doesn’t “feel strongly about any of those [terms] in a negative way. I do think that sometimes the genre of horror harms, because when you say something is horror, you tend to come to it expecting to be terrified. But I don’t know that my work does that exactly. I think if there’s any kind of horror, it’s more in the subtle end of things, maybe more unsettling than actually horrifying.”

In person, Aguda is soft-spoken, sincere, and a deep listener, and she peppers the conversation with humor. She was born in the Nigerian state of Ondo, raised in Lagos, and had a career in architecture before moving to the U.S. to study at the University of Michigan, where she earned an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She has won the O. Henry Prize, and her novel The Suicide Mothers is set to be published in 2026 by W. W. Norton, London feminist publisher Virago, and Nigerian publisher Masobe Books.

After graduate school, Aguda looked for a place to live that was “somewhere affordable, somewhere literary,” and friends invited her to Philadelphia. She walked around the city and settled on West Philadelphia.

“I liked all the art. The people looked interesting and everybody was chill. I was like, ‘Okay, I can make it work.’ I think it’s okay to pick a place and decide to love it as opposed to go into it because you love it.”

Ghostroots came together as a collection when Aguda reviewed stories she had written over a number of years, and noticed a theme.

“I remember somebody in my MFA [program] saying that there were lots of dysfunctional families in my stories. And I was very surprised by that diagnosis, but looking back, I think there are interesting family dynamics.”

At the time, in her early to mid-20s, she was thinking a lot about “what we inherit and what we pass on and the history that’s inaccessible to us.”

Her own history now includes a place far from her origins, and yet she’s not expecting Philadelphia to show up in her writing anytime soon.

“I think so far all my preoccupations or just all the things I’m interested in have been so steeped in Nigeria and its culture. And I think once I start writing about America, it will show that my center has shifted.”

In any case, the fantastical will continue.

“I love reading fiction where strange things happen. So strange things will always happen in my fiction because I delight in reading it, and I think there’s something true that can be revealed when realities are askew.”