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Greg Ruth Illustrates the “Powerful Central Women” of Nnedi Okorafor’s Novels in Stunning New Book Covers

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Home / Greg Ruth Illustrates the “Powerful Central Women” of Nnedi Okorafor’s Novels in Stunning New Book Covers
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Greg Ruth Illustrates the “Powerful Central Women” of Nnedi Okorafor’s Novels in Stunning New Book Covers

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Published on September 7, 2016

Illustration by Greg Ruth
Greg Ruth Nnedi Okorafor illustrations German editions novels
Illustration by Greg Ruth

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:

Greg Ruth Nnedi Okorafor The Book of Phoenix German edition illustration cover
Illustration by Greg Ruth

“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:

Greg Ruth Nnedi Okorafor Lagoon German edition book cover illustration
Illustration by Greg Ruth

The third in this series is Onyesonwu from Who Fears Death:

Nnedi Okorafor Who Fears Death Greg Ruth illustration book cover German edition
Illustration by Greg Ruth

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.

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Natalie Zutter

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