The True Cost of Female Agency

In her debut collection, Ghostroots, ’Pemi Aguda challenges our assumptions about the complexities of female relationships, heightening the outcomes by casting them in, and sometimes against, a city that is both magnificent and macabre.

Pemi Aguda has worn many faces before this iteration as a celebrated author. As one of the vanguards of the Nigerian blog revolution in the early 2010s, Aguda started her online writing career as ThatDarkBetty in the late 2000s and edited the proto-literary magazine, AfroSays. She curated and contributed stories to numerous digital anthologies, including the Decades anthology, which explored the lives of women across several decades. She also mid-wifed the Nigerian retelling of the ‘Vagina Monologues’, hosted on the now defunct The Naked Convos, delving into feminist literature long before it became mainstream in the Nigerian blogosphere. Aguda also ran Betty’s Tuesday, a weekly fiction column, where she dutifully wrote and published one short story a week for seven years. The world took notice when her haunting short story, ‘Caterer, Caterer’, won the Writivism fiction prize in 2015...