After winning just about every major science fiction and fantasy award, Nnedi Okorafor explores a traumatic event in her own history in her most autobiographical novel yet.
When Nnedi Okorafor was 19, she woke up disoriented in a hospital room. Fluorescent pink and green grasshoppers and praying mantises bounced around her hospital bed, making strange clicks. An enormous crow threw itself against the window, trying to break in.
Once she was no longer hallucinating from pain medication, though, things got stranger and scarier: She tried to get out of bed, and found she couldn’t move her legs. Okorafor soon learned that she was paralyzed from the waist down from nerve damage that occurred during back surgery for scoliosis.
A star athlete and pre-med college student, Okorafor lost her faith in medicine, and felt alienated from her own body. “It was a death of who I was going to be,” she said of the paralysis. It was also a rebirth of sorts.
