Olufunke Grace Bankole
- Writing: Fiction and Nonfiction 2025
Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer and novelist.
A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in 2 Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, Electric Literature, Poets & Writers, Stand Magazine, Writer’s Digest, Portland Monthly Magazine, and elsewhere.
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 has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing.
Bankole’s debut novel, THE EDGE OF WATER, set between Nigeria and New Orleans, was published in February 2025 by Tin House Books and named A Best Book of February at Oprah Daily, Apple Books, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, The Root, Alta Journal, Debutiful, Write or Die Magazine, and many other places. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.
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 has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing.
Bankole’s debut novel, THE EDGE OF WATER, set between Nigeria and New Orleans, was published in February 2025 by Tin House Books and named A Best Book of February at Oprah Daily, Apple Books, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, The Root, Alta Journal, Debutiful, Write or Die Magazine, and many other places. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.