It’s no secret that we at Tor.com love Nnedi Okorafor (author of the Hugo-winning novella Binti and its forthcoming sequel, Binti: Home); and we’ve enjoyed a long and fun partnership with illustrator Greg Ruth, who has illustrated many a Tor.com piece to stunning effect. So we were delighted to learn that Okorafor and Ruth were teaming up for their own collaboration—illustrating new covers for the German editions of Okorafor’s novels. Both have shared the art on their respective Facebook pages, and wow, is it amazing.
Ruth posted the cover art for the German translation of The Book of Phoenix:
“As we seem to have a sort of backdoor series happening here,” he wrote in the post, “I thought we’d take the opportunity to continue the theme of straight up portraits of these powerful central women that define Nnedi’s novels.” The first was for the Lagoon cover, below, which he originally showed at San Diego Comic-Con:
The third in this series is Onyesonwu from Who Fears Death:
Okorafor included a passage from the novel in her Facebook post:
“My mother named me Onyesonwu. It means, ‘Who fears death?’ She named me well. I was born twenty years ago, during troubled times. Ironically I grew up far from all the killing…”
Cross Cult will publish the German translations of Okorafor’s novels starting in October with Lagune.
