Necessary Fiction: Eloghosa Osunde

WHAT MAKES A FAMILY? HOW IS IT DEFINED AND BY WHOM? IS FREEDOM FOR EVERYONE?

‘Necessary Fiction's Nigerians are brazen, willful, sexy, dynamic, explosive. They love hard, fight fierce, and love fiercer. And yet they are forced to the margins of their own society, having to navigate love and happiness under a blanket of fear, danger, and uncertainty. When life has risk at every turn, family is chosen, and love is on the edge of the knife, fiction indeed becomes necessary.’ MARLON JAMES

‘Heart, privacy, sex, yearning so strong it buckles you. It’s all here’ KAVEH AKBAR

‘This book is exquisite and excruciating. It quickens your pulse and burns inside you for days … Osunde reminds us what it really means to be alive. A gorgeously deeply humane book, which is indeed, necessary' NICOLE DENNIS-BENN

Across Lagos, a rolling cast of unforgettable characters seek out love in all its forms, daring to push all other relationships – with partners, family and friends – to the brink in the process. As they form and break unexpected connections, they reveal how they know each other, have loved each other and had their hearts broken in that pursuit.

Stubbornly alive and brazenly flawed, they work to establish themselves in the city’s worlds of art, music, entertainment and creativity while reckoning with desire, fear, death and God. Here, we witness their collective and individual attempts to grapple with the necessary fictions that they all carry for survival.

This is a shimmering, defiant cross-generational portrait of what it means to be queer in contemporary Nigeria.

About our speaker: Eloghosa Osunde is a Nigerian writer and multidisciplinary artist. Their short stories have been published by Catapult, Guernica, Granta and The Paris Review. They won the 2021 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction, as well as an ASME Award for fiction and MoAD’s African Literary Award. Their debut novel Vagabonds!  was a finalist for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.