Alexis Okeowo – författare

From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America.“In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster….”Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery—the former seat of the Confederacy—as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Here, she weaves her family’s story with Alabama’s, defying stereotypes about her endlessly complex, often-pigeonholed home state. She immerses us in a landscape dominated today not by cotton fields but by Amazon warehouses, encountering high-powered Christian business leaders lobbying for tribal sovereignty and small-town women coming out against conservative politics. Okeowo shows how people can love their home while still acknowledging its sins.In this perspective-shifting work that is both an intimate memoir and a journalistic triumph, Okeowo investigates her life, other Alabamians’ lives, and the state’s lesser-known histories to examine why Alabama has been the stage for the most extreme results of the American experiment.

''Absolutely essential reading, period'' Alexandra Fuller, bestselling author of Don''t Lets Go to the Dogs TonightWINNER of the 2018 PEN Open Book AwardIn the tradition of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, this is a masterful, humane work of literary journalism by New Yorker staff writer Alexis Okeowo - a vivid narrative of Africans who are courageously resisting their continent''s wave of fundamentalism.In A Moonless, Starless Sky Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony''s LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women''s basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram. This debut book by one of America''s most acclaimed young journalists illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary - lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world.