“The revelation that stuns”: An Interview with Lesley Nneka Arimah
Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the UK and grew up in Nigeria and wherever else her father was stationed for work. Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize , the Caine Prize and an O. Henry Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, GRANTA and has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation, United States Artists and MacDowell. She was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and her debut collection WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2018 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. She lives in Minneapolis and is working on a novel about you.
Lesley Nneka Arimah, our 2026 Fiction Contest judge, is interviewed by Michael Wesner, our 2026 Fiction Editor.
MICHAEL WESNER: BWR prides itself as a home for uncanny, strange, and speculative literature. As a writer whose fiction spans multiple genres, how do you feel about genre/speculative fiction’s relationship with mainstream literary outlets? Have you noticed any recent trends or changes in this regard?
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH: My finger is barely skimming the pulse here, but I do think there were inklings of a revival of interest in literary speculative fiction in the late aughts/early 2010’s which saw writers like Diane Cook at the vanguard. I will always mention Cook specifically as her collection, Man vs Nature remains an exemplary text of the genre. By the late 2010’s this revival was in full swing and now it seems as though certain types of speculative literature are normalized in literary spaces, particularly speculative literature that turns the world askew vs works of high fantasy or hard science fiction which occupy their own genres.
This is very informal, you understand, as there have always been writers of literary speculative fiction even before the market’s renewed interest and even that distinction, “literary”, feels nebulous and is often arbitrary. I am no respecter of genres in the sense that I don’t discriminate in my reading and I would like to think that there is a growing number of mainstream outlet decision-makers who read voraciously across all genres with an eye towards dexterity of language and ingenuity of phrase rather than subject matter. It is one of the few ways in which I’m optimistic.
MICHAEL WESNER: How consciously do you consider the genre of your own stories while writing? Do you know from the onset whether a piece will break away from realism, or do these elements typically take some time to reveal themselves?
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH: Most of my speculative pieces are sparked by a premise, so I do know from the onset whether a story will be speculative. Every once in a while a story I imagined as realism will take a turn, but for the most part I go into it knowing.
MICHAEL WESNER: One of my favorite aspects of your stories is that they often contain grimly comedic qualities. Your work frequently forces me to laugh at a surprising moment of levity, only to be followed by acute guilt when I consider the full situation. Is this sense of surprise something you strive for? How often do you purposefully aim to subvert a reader’s expectations?
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH: Oh, I love a guilty laugh, so thank you for that. Humor is part of how I process things and there’s a part of me that finds everything a little funny. I could be living the worst day of my life (and have!) and the tiny nihilist joker inside me knows that tomorrow, or a month from now, or a year(s) later, I will find some aspect of it stunningly hilarious. I don’t always plan these injections of humor when I write, they often insert themselves, but the impulse is always to relieve some built-up pressure.
MICHAEL WESNER: From the reader’s perspective, you seem equally comfortable operating in first, second, and third-person points of view. How do you determine which perspective is right for a given story or character? Does one POV stand out as a favorite?
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH: I like a close third when navigating pieces that have a lot of moving parts. If the story requires a lot of worldbuilding for example, or when a work of realism requires moments of emotional exposition that would feel clumsy or overly self-aware in first person. If anything, I’d say that I default to close third unless the piece calls for otherwise. I have found myself writing more first person recently, but only when the character’s personality is a close exaggeration of my own.
MICHAEL WESNER: Last question, and one that will be especially intriguing to our contest entrants. What elements excite you most when reading a work of fiction As the judge of BWR’s fiction contest, are there any specific qualities you might look for in submissions?
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH: I am a pretty generous reader, from quiet domestic horror to alien invasions to goblins on a rampage, there’s nothing I don’t enjoy. So I default to my love of language–the clean, hard-working line, the phrase that perfectly captures an unexpressed sentiment, the revelation that stuns. Things like that.
Lesley Nneka Arimah is the author of the Kirkus Prize-winning short story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. To read more about her and her work, you can check out her website here. If you’d like to learn more about BWR’s 2026 contest, you can read the guidelines on our Submittable page, or check out our most recent contest issue, 52.2, by grabbing yourself a copy from our online store.