Mother of Mysteries: Writing the Multi-voice Novel

Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer. The Edge of Water (Tin House), her debut novel, has been praised by Oprah Daily, Goodreads, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, Electric Literature, The Root, Debutiful, and more; named a Best Book of 2025 by Apple; and is currently a Finalist for the Westport Prize for Literature and a Finalist for the New American Voices Award. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and Poets & Writers. 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 other honors.