Introduction:
The short story remains perhaps closest to the traditional form of storytelling. In fewer words than the novel and at a usually faster pace, whole worlds are formed, and there is great illumination on the small, disparate aspects of humanity’s destiny.
Uche Okonkwo and Pemi Aguda—both Nigerian writers—have over the years, through stories that are gentle but rigorous, keen but empathetic, examined intimate spaces and moments that make up a life. On Sep 1, 2024 at 7pm GMT+1, they will be in conversation for A Long House’s Long Talk series, discussing how the form of the short story engages with individual and even collective destiny.
About the speakers:
‘Pemi Aguda is an MFA graduate from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and the winner of the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Award. Her writing has been published in One Story, Granta, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Zoetrope, and other publications, and has been awarded the O. Henry Prize for short fiction in 2022 and 2023. She is the author of a collection of stories, Ghostroots (W.W. Norton, 2024; Virago Press, 2024; and Masobe Books, 2024). Pemi is from Lagos, Nigeria.
Uche Okonkwo stories have been published in A Public Space, One Story, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, and Lagos Noir, among others. She is the author of the debut story collection A Kind of Madness: Tin House (2024); Narrative Landscape (2024); and VERVE Books (2025). A former Bernard O’Keefe Scholar at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and resident at Art Omi, she is a recipient of the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, a Steinbeck Fellowship, and an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. Okonkwo grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and is currently pursuing a creative writing PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
This conversation will be moderated by Kemi Falodun
About Long Talk and A Long House
Long Talk is a series we began because of the need for black intellectual exchange on the African continent but also in the world at large. Our hope is to, with these series of conversations across intimate diasporas, create the largest and most important archive of black discourse in our time. We’ve organized a number of these talks, in video and text, published on our website, and for them, we’ve brought together renowned writers, among whom are Pulitzer Prize, Caine Prize, and Windham-Campbell prize winners, whose work continues to shape literary discourse and thought. Attendees have so far come from all over the world—Botswana, Kenya, Belgium, Ghana, the UK, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria, and the US.
Long Talk is organized by A Long House, a new frontier for black thought, stories, and critical discourse, which seeks through art, aesthetic, and language to center blackness as a form of long memory.
