Barely two weeks after bagging an Eisner Award, Nigeria’s Nnedi Okorafor has won the coveted Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic for her graphic novel, “LaGuardia”. She won the award with illustrators Tana Ford and James Devlin.
This is a second Hugo win for Okorafor who became the first Nigerian to win the award in 2016 for her novella, “Binti”.
First awarded in 1953, the Hugo Award is annually conferred by the World Science Fiction Society to highlight the best works of science fiction published in the preceding year.
Previous winners include Ursula K. Le Guin, Nail Gaiman and J.K Rowling.
The 2020 ceremony was hosted by “Game of Thrones” author and a good friend of Okorafor, George R. R. Martin.
Accepting the award, Okorafor said, “LaGuardia is a narrative about immigration, identity, belonging, love, birth, rebirth, so so much. And it’s about aliens. I’d been growing the story for about six years in my head. It was a joy to work on. And everyone on the LaGuardia team brought a powerful energy to this and I think this really comes through. What a time and such an honor for this story to win both a Hugo and an Eisner Award.”
“LaGuardia” tells an Africanfuturist story of a Nigerian-American doctor Future Nwafor Chukwuebuka and her illegal alien plant named Letme Live in futuristic New York.
Okorafor writes fantasy and science fiction for both children and adults. She is best known for her novels “Binti,” “Who Fears Death,” “Zahrah the Windseeker,” “Akata Witch,” and “Lagoon”. Other than fiction, she has also written for comics and film
