Nommo 2018: Novella Nominations

BINTI: HOME

Nnedi Okorafor

It’s been a year since Binti and Okwu enrolled at Oomza University. A year since Binti was declared a hero for uniting two warring planets. A year since she found friendship in the unlikeliest of places.

And now she must return home to her people, with her friend Okwu by her side, to face her family and face her elders.

But Okwu will be the first of his race to set foot on Earth in over a hundred years, and the first ever to come in peace.

After generations of conflict can human and Meduse ever learn to truly live in harmony?

Nnedi Okorafor won the first Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novella for Binti in 2017. Nnedi is a Nigerian American writer of speculative fiction for both children and adults and a full professor at the University at Buffalo, New York. Her works include Who Fears Death, the Binti novella series, the Book of Phoenix, the Akata series and Lagoon.  She is the winner of Hugo, Nebula, Macmillan and World Fantasy Awards and her debut novel Zahrah the Windseeker won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. She divides her time between Buffalo and Chicago with her daughter Anyaugo and family. Learn more about Nnedi at Nnedi.com.

FALLOW

Sofia Samatar

"...a told-tale, set on a colony (of sorts) in distant space occupied by a society of Christians who abandoned Earth when it was breaking down. The three parts of the novella focus, one each, on a person the protagonist has known and their particular story as it relates to the story of the colony and the protagonist herself. The first is a childhood teacher who eventually committed suicide; the second is “Brother Lookout,” who was a leader of a spiritual splinter group that advocated open relations with outsiders;  the third is her own sister, who ran away (or so we hope) with an Earthman whom she rescued from execution-as-isolationist-policy during her time working in the Castle."

Sofia Samatar is a Somali-American educator, poet and writer. She is an Assistant Professor of English at James Madison University. In 2013, she published the award-winning fantasy novel A Stranger in Olondria.

THE MURDERS OF MOLLY SOUTHBOURNE

Tade Thompson

Every time she bleeds a murderer is born. Experience the horror of Tade Thompson's The Murders of Molly Southbourne.

The rule is simple: don't bleed.

For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she's been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.

Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she'll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?

Tade Thompson was the first winner of the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Novel for Rosewater in 2017. Tade lives and works in the UK. He is Yoruba and has a background in medicine, psychiatry and social anthropology.