African Speculative Fiction is a genre categorizing works of science fiction and fantasy by African writers.
However, it goes on to include broader works of speculative/fantastical fiction, such as horror, slipstream, interstitial, narratives based on traditional myths, as well as alternate history.
While this is by no means an exhaustive list, we present twenty of the most noteworthy in the genre, breaking ground in perhaps the most significant genre of African Literature at present.
Gabrielle Emem Harry writes speculative stories that sparkle with queer hope, mythic power, and Lagos in vivid technicolour.
In A Name Is a Plea and a Prophecy, she crafted a spellbinding short story that won the Nommo Award. She weaves African futures grounded in ritual, identity, and longing.
Tendai Huchu, writing as T. L. Huchu, hails from Zimbabwe. His speculative works mix social critique, supernatural oddities, and biting irony, adding surreal fantasy and weird edges into city life in Harare and beyond. He’s known for The Hairdresser of Harare, The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician.
In 2022, The Library of the Dead won the Nommo Award for Best Novel and snagged the American Library Association’s Alex Award.
Ukamaka Olisakwe writes bold speculative stories rooted in Nigerian culture and feminist fury. Her tales explore identity, exile, and mythic echoes of violence and healing. She won a Nommo Award for Don’t Answer When They Call Your Name.
Olisakwe was honored as one of Africa’s top emergent voices under forty in the UNESCO Africa39 project. She also earned a coveted Deborah Rogers Writers Award, evidence of her force as a storyteller reimagining Nigerian futures.
In 2023, Vagabonds! won the Museum of African Diaspora’s African Literary Award. Earlier, their story “Good Boy” earned The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize in 2021.
Eloghosa Osunde writes speculative stories that echo Lagos’s pulse and psyche. They blend futurism with personal revelations. Their debut story collection, Songs of the Son, includes tales where digital spirits haunt Instagram, ancestors dwell in elevators, and trauma becomes a map.
Nnedi Okorafor is a visionary of Africanfuturism. She wrote Binti, Who Fears Death, and Lagoon. Her characters are Afrofuturist heroes grappling with gods, technology, and identity. She imagines futures anchored in African cosmology, where space travel feels ancestral and magic scans as science.
Binti won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella in 2016, and Who Fears Death snagged the World Fantasy Award in 2011.
‘Pemi Aguda writes horror like honey spiked with thorns, bringing Lagos to life with ghosts, curses, and terrifying secrets.
She won the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award in 2020 for her novel The Suicide Mothers. She also snagged two O. Henry Prizes—in 2022 for Breastmilk and again in 2023 for The Hollow. Her award-winning short fiction, like Things Boys Do, blends everyday struggles with supernatural terror.
Akwaeke Emezi is a genre-fluid storyteller who dances across fantasy, realism, and spiritual horror. In Pet, monsters hide in plain sight. In Freshwater, the self splinters into gods. Emezi’s stories blur reality and metaphysics, where identity and spirit collide.
They won the 2019 Otherwise Award for Freshwater and the 2022 Stonewall Book Award for Dear Senthuran, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Africa region) in 2017.
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is a multi-award-winning writer, editor, and advocate for African speculative fiction.
His anthology The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction became history—it won the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology, making him the first African-born Black writer, editor, and publisher to achieve the feat.
His novelette O2 Arena earned him the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 2022. And “Ife-Iyoku” won the Elsewhere Award (formerly the Otherwise Award) in 2021, honoring speculative works redefining gender imagination. Ekpeki didn’t stop there—his anthology Dominion also won the British Fantasy Award in 2021
Innocent Chizaram Ilo writes stories where queerness, magic, and rebellion bloom in full colour. Their debut story When a Woman Renounces Motherhood flips tradition inside out and won the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa—Ilo was the youngest-ever regional winner at just 23.
Their fiction often features young queer Nigerians facing pain, power, and transformation.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa writes big magic and bigger questions. In David Mogo, Godhunter, Lagos becomes a battleground for gods. In Son of the Storm, he builds a rich, West Africa-inspired fantasy world filled with rebellion and secrets.
In 2020, his novel David Mogo, Godhunter won the Nommo Award for Best Speculative Novel.
Chikodili Emelumadu writes with swagger, shadows, and spiritual teeth. In 2020, her book, Sin Eater, won the Nommo Award for Best Short Story.
Her debut novel, Dazzling, is a tale of girls caught between gods and girlhood. Her short stories, found in AFROSF and other anthologies, mix Nigerian folklore, sharp humour, and eerie suspense. Emelumadu is a high priestess of Nigerian horror and speculative playfulness.
Ada Nnadi is a fresh, fearless voice in African speculative fiction, with their short story Tiny Bravery winning the Nommo Award for Best Short Story.
Their short stories have appeared in Omenana and FIYAH, gathering potent attention across African SFF circles. Her work often explores queer identity, body horror, and surreal transformation.
South African writer Nerine Dorman blends gothic beauty with speculative grit. Her stories often explore myth, the occult, and ecological dread. In The Company of Birds and In Southern Light, she weaves folklore with contemporary longing.
In 2020, her short story Tiny Bravery won the Nommo Award for Best Short Story, while in 2021, her novella The Firebird won the South African Independent Publishers Award for Best Novella.
Tomi Adeyemi lit the sky with Children of Blood and Bone. The novel won the Andre Norton Award, the Lodestar (Hugo YA Award), and the Nebula (through Andre Norton) in 2019. She also received the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and landed on TIME’s 100 Most Influential People list.
Inspired by Yoruba mythology and Black resistance, she gives readers a fantasy epic rooted in African culture.
Moses Ose Utomi is a rising star who’s already casting long shadows. His debut novella, The Lies of the Ajungo, is sharp, mythic, and mournful.
Drawing from Nigerian stories and traditions, Utomi’s work often centres young protagonists facing monstrous systems, and sometimes monstrous selves.
Masha du Toit spins tales where magic lives in South African shadows. Her Dark City series blends science fiction with fantasy and mystery. You’ll find telepathic dogs, ancient secrets, and cybernetic beings lurking in alleyways.
In 2018 and 2019, The Real and The Strange earned Nommo Award shortlist status, marking her as a standout writer.
Eugen Bacon is a master of speculative lyricism. Tanzanian-born and Australian-based, her work crosses continents, timelines, and genres.
Her nonfiction Afro-Centred Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction won the 2025 Locus Award and the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award.
In his novella Undulation, published in the Sauútiverse anthology Mothersound, he explores sound, memory, and rebellion in a Southern African mythical future.
As a founder of the Sauútiverse shared world, he choreographs stories like orchestral movements across African speculative landscapes. In 2024, Undulation won the Nommo Award for Best Novella by an African.
His anthology editing and essay Cosmologies and Languages Building Africanfuturism earned him a James Currey Fellowship at Oxford in 2022. He also topped the Africa Writers Prize finalist list for his YA novel, Bones & Runes.
Tochi Onyebuchi is a literary force. With Riot Baby, Goliath, and Beasts Made of Night, he smashes the line between dystopia and prophecy. Goliath shows future cities torn by inequality and ecological collapse.
Onyebuchi has been nominated for major awards like the Hugo, Nebula, and Nommo.
Wole Talabi is an engineer of worlds, with his stories fusing science, Yoruba mythology, and speculative theory into tightly packed explosions of meaning. In Incomplete Solutions and Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, he gives readers tech gods, spiritual hackers, and quantum ancestors.
Talabi is a winner of the Nommo Award for African Speculative Fiction and secured the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
