photo by Lena Szymoniak 

francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, storyteller, and multidisciplinary artist from Lagos, Nigeria. 

She was awarded the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020). Butter Honey Pig Bread was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin Literary Award.

CBC’s Canada Reads, an annual “Battle of the Books,” selected Butter Honey Pig Bread as one of five contenders in 2021 for “the one book that all of Canada should read.” The novel made it to the grand finale, where it placed second.

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Forthcoming in the fall of 2023 is Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements, a collaborative experimental non-fiction book with Roger Mooking.

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Her writing has been published in Winter Tangerine Review, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, the Malahat Review, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, GUTS magazine, the Puritan, Canadian Art, and elsewhere. Her story Ọrun is Heaven, was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize.

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francesca has created several experimental short films, with screenings at Black Film Festival in Montreal, Halifax, and Toronto; Durham Region International Film Festival (DRIFF); Nocturne Halifax; and the Khyber Centre for the Arts.