‘This is a landmark memoir from a hugely important writer. Akwaeke Emezi's work is heart-stopping in its honesty and breathtaking in its quality. I feel incredibly privileged to publish them and am excited for their future - and their future readers!’
Dear Senthuran is a raw exploration of identity that shatters boundaries and explodes the way we think about the idea of the self. In letters addressed to their friends, to members of their family – both biological and chosen – and to fellow storytellers, Akwaeke describes the shape of a life lived in overlapping realities. Through heartbreak, chronic pain, intimacy with death, becoming a beast, this is embodiment as a nonhuman: outside the boundaries imposed by expectations and legibility. This book is an account of the gruelling work of realignment and remaking necessary to carve out a future for oneself. The result is a Black spirit memoir: a powerful, raw unfolding of identity.
Akwaeke Emezi (they/them) is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Vivek Oji, which was longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Pet, a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature; and Freshwater, which was named a New York Times Notable Book, longlisted for both the Wellcome Book Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Selected as a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation, they are based in liminal spaces.