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Olufunke Grace Bankole

Biography

Olufunke Grace Bankole

Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review and Stand Magazine. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View and has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Olufunke Grace Bankole

Books by Olufunke Grace Bankole

by Olufunke Grace Bankole - Fiction

In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria. Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion and folklore and the tellings of three generations of daring women, it is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.