Pushcart Prize nominee, writer and photographer Ayotola Tehingbola's first short story collection Lagos Will Be Hard For You was published by Masobe Books on June 30th in Nigeria. The collection has also been acquired by Sareeta Domingo at Jacaranda Books for publication in 2026, in a two-book deal, together with her debut novel-in-progress The Last Electric Man in the World, slated for publication in 2027. The manuscript will be ready to share in October 2025.
English rights for NA for both titles are currently available, as well as all translation and audiovisual rights.
Ayotola’s writing has appeared/is forthcoming in numerous publications including The Washington Square Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net Anthology.. Her work was shortlisted for the 2023 Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize for Debut Novel and she is a three-time recipient of a Glenn Bach Award for Fiction. She is currently a PhD candidate and instructor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri.
Lagos Will Be Hard For You, which was a finalist for the 2024 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing in Fiction, is reminiscent of Jamil Jan Kochai's The Haunting of Hajji Hotak or Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's Manchester Happened, set between Nigeria and the US, and exploring the constant straddling of two worlds: the need to make sense of home, and the weight of being lost and out of place in a new world. Ayotola puts African women’s experience centre-stage as her stories weave the imagined with the real, the personal with the political. As such, she writes with urgency about social injustice and real-life events such as the 2015 kidnapping of the Chibok school girls, while exploring intimate question of identity, mental health, friendship, family, grief and sexual awakening and testing the boundaries of satire, vice and folly.
In these stories, an almost-blind mother pawns her daughter off to save her. A grieving son must bury his Muslim father in twenty-four hours in the thick of winter. A doctor battles to save her partner from himself. Desperation makes a young businesswoman seek out a spiritual experience. Two men kidnap a White man to fight the infiltration of oil companies in Southern Nigeria. A boy escapes his bipolar mother.
For more information about the above titles, please contact Carla Briner (carla@pontas-agency.com).