Ayotola Tehingbola (MFA, fiction writing, 2024) recently had her story collection, “Lagos Will Be Hard for You,” shortlisted for the 2025 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.
The collection, featuring stories set between Nigeria and the US, explores the constant straddling of two worlds: the need to make sense of home, and the weight of being lost and out of place in a new world. Tehingbola puts the experiences of African characters center-stage as her stories weave the imagined with the real, the personal with the political. She writes with urgency about social injustice and real-life events such as the 2015 kidnapping of the Chibok school girls, the 2020 #EndSARS protests where the army killed protesters under the cover of night, and the devastating effects of Western oil exploration in the Niger-Delta, while exploring intimate questions of identity, mental health, friendship, family, grief and sexual awakening.
The story collection is set to be published in hardback on June 4, 2026, by Jacaranda Books.