Suyi

A screenshot from an interview with economist Bernard Lietaer in Green America. Text reads: "BERNARD: I actually disagree that growth as a whole needs to stop. I think what we need is to stop stupid material growth. What I believe is that we only need more smart growth. For instance, we need (yellow highlight begins from this point) an infinity of growth in learning. An infinity of growth in beauty. Large amounts of growth in care, help and restoration (yellow highlight ends). So the question is not whether we need growth or not. The real question is to define what kind of growth."

When folks ask me, "What are your politics?"

2025 winners medallion for the Ignyte Awards: a round, golden medallion with the FIYAH logo on it, and the words "2025 Ignyte Awards Winner." Medallion rests on the cover of the novel Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa.

2025 winners medallion for the Ignyte Awards: a round, golden medallion with the FIYAH logo on it, and the words "2025 Ignyte Awards Winner." Medallion rests on an open palm.

2025 winners medallion for the Ignyte Awards: the rear side, featuring artwork of a knight-like figure, rising out of flames, clutching the hilt of a sword. Medallion rests on an open palm.

Author Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Black man, slightly bearded, dressed in a mocha-coloured shirt) biting into the Ignyte winners medallion. In the background: a bookshelf.

Winner's medallion for #LostArkDreaming arrived in the mail from @theignyteawards.bsky.social! Thanks to the #IgnyteAwards team (esp @ldlewiswrites.blacksky.app + @sillysyntax.bsky.social) for the good work of making this happen every year, and artist @nilahmagruder.com for the excellent art.

2025 winners medallion for the Ignyte Awards: a round, golden medallion with the FIYAH logo on it, and the words "2025 Ignyte Awards Winner." Medallion rests on the cover of the novel Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa.

2025 winners medallion for the Ignyte Awards: a round, golden medallion with the FIYAH logo on it, and the words "2025 Ignyte Awards Winner." Medallion rests on an open palm.

2025 winners medallion for the Ignyte Awards: the rear side, featuring artwork of a knight-like figure, rising out of flames, clutching the hilt of a sword. Medallion rests on an open palm.

Author Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Black man, slightly bearded, dressed in a mocha-coloured shirt) biting into the Ignyte winners medallion. In the background: a bookshelf.

Winner's medallion for #LostArkDreaming arrived in the mail from @theignyteawards.bsky.social! Thanks to the #IgnyteAwards team (esp @ldlewiswrites.blacksky.app + @sillysyntax.bsky.social) for the good work of making this happen every year, and artist @nilahmagruder.com for the excellent art.

A screenshot from The Continent. Partial text: The Continent 28 FEBRUARY 2026 | ISSUE 230 TC BOOK REVIEW BY JACQUELINE NYATHI How safe is sound? If you haven't explored the Sautiverse yet, you're missing out on a fascinating project from an African collective. THE SAUÚTIVERSE is Afrocentric fantasy centred on sound. This universe is held together by the mysterious Mothersound, its magic mediated through song, instruments, and words. Sauúti Terrors, the second short-story collection (after Mothersound) expands the Sauútiverse in dark directions. It brings welcome depth. The editors of the latest anthology - Cheryl Ntumy, Eugen Bacon, and Stephen Embleton - wanted to bring realism to this imaginary African future by showing readers that "everything is not perfect in the federation of planets". In Sauúti Terrors, sound magic is perverted through human failing, through its sheer power, or because good, life-giving sound must have its antithesis in destructive anti-sound (or silence). The collection's authors - including Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Wole Talabi, T.L. Huchu, Moustapha Mbacké Diop, J. Umeh, and more - show us what could go wrong. In Umeh's excellent The Sounding, a healer learns of ancient, evil beings when she becomes inhabited by one. A similarly chilling exploration occurs in Kofi Nyameye's The Unspoken, which unpacks clandestine government experiments at secret military bases. Ntumy's Where Daylight Bows to Darkness gives us an alternate view of 2024's Song for the Shadows in which we meet the mysterious Shad-Dari for the second time. A spacecraft in Wole Talabi's The Final Flight of the Ungu-ugnu is powered by humans singing in chorus. Xan van Rooyen's unsettling Kyi'yaji features anti-music recorded in scars - which can be played back.

Some of my thoughts on this excellent collection in this week's @thecontinent.org, which you can download here: www.thecontinent.org/_files/ugd/2...

Lost Ark Dreaming, by Suyi Davies Okungbowa.

5/ Lost Ark Dreaming, by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Afrofuturism is consistently outstanding, and this is a tale of greed, climate change, inequality, and sea monsters.

A book cover for Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. It shows five towers rising from the high sea levels in front of what looks like a setting sun, four of which have more or less crumbled, with only the fifth still intact in the center. A blurb by Tlotlo Tsamaase reads, "A surreal fusion of African politics, climate fiction, and mythology in the tongue of poetry and philosophy".

6. "Lost Ark Dreaming" by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Great blend of dystopia, post-apocalyptic settings, class hierarchy observations and Nigerian mythology, I think I read this in pretty much one sitting, it was so good. 🌊

#booksky #top10books2025 #lostarkdreaming

The Cookout: A Speculative Fiction Anthology Sci-fi, fantasy, & horror stories by Black authors, centering traditions of “the cookout” — the joy, the drama, and the delicious food.

We're so close! Help us get there! www.kickstarter.com/projects/and...

However he goes out, the scale of destruction and theft facilitated by this government will be burried under the rubble for years. Decades from now, the US will still be discovering monies siphoned from the government into billionaire oligarch pockets, president's included. Mad ting, we say.

Oof. I really can't get over how the orange clown is the US's own Abacha/Tinubu. A wannabe mobster who converts the entire government into a self-enrichment program, all the while provoking and stoking divisive tensions so no one is focused enough to hold them to account. Mad ting.

👏!

I still think about this post every now and then, and I believe Black History Month is a good time to bring it back.

Thanks, but Not for Me Two writers embark on the often hair-raising journey to become published novelists: a standalone podcast with series potential.

So @kmveohongs.bsky.social and I pressed record, then edit, then things escalated to distribute, and now here we are. Please enjoy the first part of this 4-part standalone podcast with series potential thanksbutnotforme.com

The Cookout: A Speculative Fiction Anthology Sci-fi, fantasy, & horror stories by Black authors, centering traditions of “the cookout” — the joy, the drama, and the delicious food.

It's Black History Month, and here's an opportunity for you to directly support black authors and editors in their creative careers. This anthology includes stories by @shereereneethomas.bsky.social @davaun.bsky.social @brentclambert.bsky.social @edenroyce.bsky.social and more. Pre-order now!!

Alice McDermott’s Writing Mantra: “Ah, Fuck Em.” Photo by Miria-Sabina Maciągiewicz. As Emerson said to Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.” The same wor…

"It is a piece of sage advice, a writer’s mantra, that I have made good use of through the years and that I now pass on to you: Ah, fuck ‘em." lithub.com/alice-mcderm...

The Fist of Memory Fist Of Memory is simultaneously a near-future thriller…

Hey y'all! The official book page for my forthcoming novel The Fist of Memory is up so you can pre-order it. Here: astrapublishinghouse.com/product/the-... or here: www.amazon.co.uk/Fist-Memory-...

You can also add it to your GR “Want to Read” list!
www.goodreads.com/book/show/24...

🙏🏾🚀📖🤖

Ten(ish) of the Best African Speculative Short Fiction Stories of 2025 - Reactor Here are some of the speculative fiction gems that may have flown under the radar in 2025...

2025 was another great year for African short fiction! Author @wtalabi.com recommends 10 highlights across science fiction, fantasy, and horror, from "magic-for-wealth schemes" to an unsettling religious organization (in space). And if there's some ties in there...? We're not complaining.

Why 16 Oscar nominations for SINNERS matters, and why you've probably never heard of the oldest written Black vampire tale in North America. Happy Black History Month to all who celebrate!

Why 16 Oscar nominations for SINNERS matters, and why you've probably never heard of the oldest written Black vampire tale in North America. Happy Black History Month to all who celebrate!

Why do actors in film/TV scenes stand so close to each other while speaking? I know it's for the shot, but it always puts me off, as I'll be thinking, "Why so close? Nobody stands that close to someone they're just asking a question. Step back!"

Is exactly what I was thinking! (Of course, they would have an an odious moral compass to go with, but when has that every stopped anyone?)

Funniest (saddest?) part is I'm 100% sure someone out there who meets this criteria WILL take the job.

Congrats, Tajja! 🎉

A graphic with a background of a night sky that turns purple towards the horizon. On the horizon is a row of silhouetted trees. In white, it says "Books I can't stop thinking about" with a white arrow pointing to the right

A graphic with a background of a night sky that turns purple towards the horizon. On the horizon is a row of silhouetted trees. There are five book covers in a grid The books are: Whalefall by Daniel Kraus Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schwab Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer

These books needed their own post due to being stuck in my head throughout the year. Whether they were unsettling, a prediction for the future, or just straight up unhinged, these are the books from 2025 I couldn't stop thinking about.

💙📚 #booksky

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS for emerging BIPOC writers in Canada: an opportunity to work with Lindsay Wong Arsenal Pulp Press is a book publisher in Vancouver, Canada with over 300 titles currently in print, which include literary fiction and nonfiction; cultural and gender studies; LGBT and multicultural ...

Just spotted this: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS for emerging BIPOC writers in Canada: an opportunity to work with Lindsay Wong arsenalpulp.com/News/2025/CA...

Completing final edits for SEASON OF THE SERPENT (out in August!)
Drafting Book #9 right now, likely to finish...summer?
Already outlined Book #10. Waiting for the signal.

That's how we do it! No secret sauce, just crossed fingers and nose to the grindstone.

We have to practice solidarity. We have to recognize when we're being played and used, and what makes us strong and what makes us weak. Empires are always trying, *inside and outside*, to make the very people they oppress and threaten complicit in their evils and dependent on their structures.

A year ago, I worried about a US invasion. These days, I worry about something that actually scares me more: that our government (and other governments) will decide that we have to do whatever the US regime demands, and what they demand will be ever more fascist alignment.

nikita_gill o The rage you are feeling comes from the same place inside your heart as the love. This is why you refuse to accept a world where cruelty reigns and the fire consumes all. You have known hope and joy and kindness like you have known water. And justice is a river that demands you do not give up on it. - Nikita Gill

Sometimes you need a poem by @nikitagill.bsky.social.

Happy New Year.

The Suyiverse Report #6 — Suyi Davies Okungbowa Author Suyi Davies Okungbowa offers a review of the year 2025 and looks forward to the forthcoming year.

Well, that was 2025. Let's see what the next 365 days hold.
suyidavies.com/updates/suyi...