Ikenna Okeh

Ikenna Okeh is a Nigerian novelist whose work is distinguished by its engagement with migration, identity, and the shifting cartographies of African experience in the modern world. His international debut, Deportee (2022), interrogates the phenomenon of reverse immigration, drawing on narrative traditions that bridge Africa and its diasporas while opening new imaginative territories for the contemporary novel.

He has been described by Dr Nichlas Hallen of Karlstad University as ‘belonging to a generation of authors who have respectfully moved on from post-colonialism and is a type of writer who, rather than participating in the rising middle-class’s obsession with the dilemmas of identity, is hard at work supplying the reading public with good, memorable stories’.

In Octber 2024, Ikenna Okeh directed the Puebla International Literature Festival that hosted panel discussions seeking to bridge the cultural gap between African and Hispanic literary communities. He was a guest author at the Salon du Livre de Paris 2024, following the launch of the French translation of his novel, Rogues of the East, where his reflections on literary circulation and cultural translation contributed to ongoing debates about the global place of African writing.

Currently residing in Antalya, Turkiye, he combines his literary vocation with creative work in film and audiodrama. Okeh’s practice is animated by a singular conviction: that African literature must not only tell stories but also reshape the contours of global readership, insisting on both its rootedness and its reach.

He is also a co-founder of UbuntuFM, an online radio station and music promotion platform with virtual headquarters in South Africa.