books
Open City, the story of a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist in New York City five years after 9/11, was published by Random House, named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York City Book Award for Fiction. It has been translated into fifteen languages.
Every Day is for the Thief is a fiction about a young man living in New York City who goes to Lagos for a short and bewildering visit. It was my first book, published by Cassava Republic Press in 2007 in Nigeria. A revised version was published in the US (Random House) and the UK (Faber & Faber) in 2014, and six other languages. It was a New York Times Editors’ Pick, named a book of the year in the New York Times, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail, and NPR, among others, and shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award.
Known and Strange Things, a collection of essays on art, literature, photography, and politics, was published by Random House (US) and Faber & Faber (UK) in 2016. It has been translated into German and Dutch, and is forthcoming in other languages. It was named to numerous “best of the year” lists, and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay as well as for the inaugural PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, “which recognizes a book length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact.”
Blind Spot, a book of photographs and texts, was published by Random House (US) and Faber & Faber (UK) in 2017 (and in 2015 as Punto D’Ombra by Contrasto). It was enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Review of Books, among others, and was named one of the best books of 2017 by Time Magazine. Blind Spot was shortlisted for the 2017 Aperture/Paris Photo Photobook Awards, and accompanied by solo exhibitions at Galleria Forma, Milan; Steven Kasher Gallery, NY; the University of Kentucky Gallery, Lexington; the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; and the Hanes Art Gallery, Winston-Salem.
Human Archipelago, a collaboration with Fazal Sheikh dealing with the ongoing crises of migration, with text by me and images by Fazal, was published by Steidl in May 2019.
Fernweh, a book of photographs about the intersection of the history of photography, the history of tourism, and the fragility of landscapes—all set in Switzerland—was published by MACK in February 2020. It was a finalist for the Paris Photo/Aperture Book of the Year Award.
Golden Apple of the Sun, a book of photographs and text, was published by MACK (2021). Alongside photographs made in a single kitchen during the pandemic, the book contains a long written essay, as wide-ranging in its concerns—hunger, fasting, mourning, slavery, intimacy, painting, poetry and the history of photography—as the photographs are delimited in theirs. The text and photographic sequences are interspersed with an anonymous handwritten eighteenth century cookbook from Cambridge. Golden Apple of the Sun, described as “a startling document” on ArtNet, was featured in the New York Times and selected as a book of the year on LitHub.
Black Paper, a collection of wide-ranging but thematically unified essays on the senses, photography, darkness, and ethics, was published by the University of Chicago Press (2021). Based in part on lectures delivered at the University of Chicago, Black Paper plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience—not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don’t. It was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and named a book of the year by the Paris Review, Artnet, and others.
Tremor, a novel, is concerned with the passage of time and the ethical demands of history as experienced by a photographer living in Massachusetts. It was published by Random House (US) and Faber & Faber (UK) in 2023. It featured on numerous best of the year lists, including those of the Financial Times, the Times, New York Magazine, and Time Magazine.