Lesley Nneka Arimah

The collection "explores women’s dispossession from many angles, including the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters and the complicated dynamics of female friendship." Her writing, The Atlantic says, "conveys respect for the people who claw their way through relentlessly difficult lives." NPR calls it "It's a truly wonderful debut by a young author who seems certain to have a very bright literary future ahead of her."

In September 2017, she was named as one of the fiction writers honored by the National Book Foundation, called "Five Under 35"

In April 2017, her debut collection of short stories was published by Riverhead Books and Tinder Press (UK). It is titled What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. It was republished in Nigeria, by Farafina Books, in November 2017. It won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Minnesota Book Award for Fiction and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. In January 2018, it was shortlisted for the 9mobile Prize for Literature.

Lesley Nneka Arimah is a Nigerian writer, and winner of the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa, the 2017 O. Henry Prize, the 2017 Kirkus Prize, and the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing. She has been described as "a skillful storyteller who can render entire relationships with just a few lines of dialogue" and "a new voice with certain staying power."

Arimah was born on October 13, 1983 in London. She grew up in both Nigeria and the U.K., and moved to the U.S. in her early teens. She is currently at work on a novel. In 2015, her story "Light" won the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa. In 2016, 2017, and 2019, she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize. She won the 2019 edition with her story "Skinned".