Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer and novelist. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, Electric Literature, Poets & Writers, Stand Magazine (UK), Writer's Digest, Portland Monthly Magazine, and elsewhere. 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.
Bankole's debut novel, THE EDGE OF WATER, set between Nigeria and New Orleans, was published in February 2025 by Tin House Books and was named A Best Book of February at Oprah Daily, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, Apple Books, The Root, Alta Journal, Debutiful, Write or Die Magazine, and elsewhere. @olufunke.grace.bankole
Where were you born and raised? How did it influence your writing and your thinking about the world? The movement between worlds—Nigeria and the US, Ifa and Christianity, inner longing and cultural constraint—is the dynamic upon which I have based my storytelling in The Edge of Water, and the one with which I have always been familiar. Three weeks after I was born in Maryland, my parents took me to Ibadan, our ancestral home, where I lived for eight years, before returning again to the US. Throughout my childhood, I was Nigerian at home—steeped in traditional Yoruba culture; American and spiritually wandering outside of it. I wanted to be a doctor to make my African mother proud, though somewhere in my core, I was lured by the transformational power of words. Fluidity between clashing desires has been foundational to my work.
Were there any books you read at a child that made you say, “I want to do this”? The first book I remember really loving as a child was Ramona Quimby, Age 8 by Beverly Cleary—I was also eight years old at the time I read it, and newly arrived to the US (after having left with my parents as a newborn). My godmother sat with me at her kitchen counter, and read Ramona with me. At the time, I was an ESOL (English for Students of other Languages) student, and looking back, reading fiction in English helped spark my interest in how languages intersect and diverge in meaning.
My first and lingering taste of book magic began in the fifth grade I wanted, during our reading period, to return again and again to the engulfing magic of Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting. And left on my own to choose books from the library, I had read Alex Haley’s Roots by the time I was in the sixth grade.
What does an average day of writing look like for you? When I was newer to writing, I was more ritualistic about the process—needing to be at the moody café, needing really good coffee, needing to be inspired. I still need really good coffee and ideally I love to write in the early morning, sitting at my desk, at a window. But, having written this version of the novel pregnant part of the time, and with two young children, I’ve come to be less ritualistic and now I write whenever and however I can.
I'm a slow, methodical writer because I'm deeply concerned with precision of language. I had a rough outline to guide me in the writing of The Edge of Water, but I also gave myself room to deviate from it when necessary in order to move in the direction that best served the story. I do tend to edit as a I go, wanting to make sure that the words and structure of the work are telling the story I mean to tell. I've found that this approach saves a great deal of time later.
What kind of research did you do for The Edge of Water? I began writing pieces of The Edge of Water nearly eighteen years ago. A few days after graduating Harvard Law School, buoyed by the funding of a coveted fellowship, I arrived in New Orleans full of excitement. I was there to build a project aimed at equipping families of incarcerated youth with community organizing and legal advocacy tools. New Orleans nurtured me. On my days off from work, I wandered the luminous streets of my Mid-City neighborhood, particularly the French Market where the West African market women skillfully sold their wares. Sharing homelands and customs, I felt a part of them; but I understood that my economic privilege set us worlds apart.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, I no longer lived there, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the West African market women. Haunted by television images of flooding and lifelessness, I recalled how they, like me, had been far from home and working in the city’s margins. I needed to know where had they sheltered during the storm; where were they now, afterward; who had they been back in Nigeria, long before? The Edge of Water is my attempt to answer these questions through the story of Amina and Esther, told by Iyanifa—the prescient Ifa priestess who, from the spirit and earthly worlds she inhabits, reveals the layers of mysteries, of joys and heartbreak, leading to the storm.
Do you keep a journal or notebook? If so, what’s in it? Yes. I keep a journal of the dreams, serendipity, magic, and prayers of my daily life.
Which writer, living or dead, would you most like to have dinner with? I would love to have dinner with the late Yvonne Vera, Zimbabwean writer, whose novel, Butterfly Burning, stretches the parameters of language in ways I have not encountered since I first read it.
Do you draw inspiration from music, art, or other disciplines? I draw inspiration from various disciplines. In the writing of The Edge of Water, some songs--particularly ones by African musicians like Amadou and Mariam and King Sunny Ade--seemed to linger in the background of my years-long journey to completing the novel.
AI and technology is changing the ways we write and receive stories. What are your reflections on AI, technology and the future of storytelling? What concerns or curiosities do you have about AI’s role in writing? Sentience is at the heart of the most interesting and dynamic storytelling--on the page and in the ways it's received. AI can't duplicate or replace this in any way that is truly satisfying.
Tell us about some books you've recently enjoyed and your favorite books and writers of all time. Once I knew that I truly wanted to write, African women writers—and their incredible, enduring works—became foundational for me. They are the reason I imagined that I, too, could tell stories. Mariama Ba’s So Long A Letter, a spare and stunning classic, inspired the epistolary form between Esther and Amina. Tsitsi Dangarembga and Nervous Conditions kept me writing at a time when I experienced stinging rejection. And the incomparable Yvonne Vera’s body of work helps me to continually stretch the parameters of language on the page; word by word, sentence to sentence, she is a north star for me, absolutely.
For you, what is the importance of arts, culture, and The Creative Process? I think the search for meaning is at the core of the creative process, and getting a tiny peek into the creativity of other writers is quite lovely and often affirming.
