Reading List

Authors Like Alexis Okeowo

A couple who met in captivity under Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. An abolitionist in Mauritania, where slavery was outlawed in 1981 and criminalised only in 2007. A women's basketball team that kept playing in Mogadishu. A vigilante in northern Nigeria who went after Boko Haram. Those are the four stories in A Moonless, Starless Sky (Grand Central, 3 October 2017), which won the PEN Open Book Award in 2018 and which almost nobody describes accurately, because the subject is not extremism — it is what ordinary people do on the days in between. Okeowo has been a New Yorker staff writer since 2015, was based in Lagos from 2012 to 2015, and grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. That second half became Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama (Henry Holt, 5 August 2025), which puts the reporter into the frame for the first time and reports the state through the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, Africatown, a West African immigrant community and the people who stayed. The ten writers below share the method, the terrain, or the argument about who gets to do the telling.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary reportage · Alabama & West Africa · PEN Open Book Award 2018 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you want the closest match in method — years with a handful of civilians, no experts, no policy, the war visible only through what it did to a household — read Anand Gopal. For the same Nigerian story told by a Nigerian novelist, Helon Habila's The Chibok Girls covers the kidnappings that sit behind Okeowo's Boko Haram chapter. If you came for Blessings and Disasters rather than the Africa reporting, start with Imani Perry, who was born in Birmingham and won the National Book Award for a book that travels the South the same way. Azadeh Moaveni is the match for women inside an extremist movement, and Nanjala Nyabola is the writer who argues with the whole enterprise.

Every book by Alexis Okeowo →

10 authors like Alexis Okeowo

01
The method · Closest match

Anand Gopal

American · No Good Men Among the Living (2014), Days of Love and Rage (2026)

Gopal reported the American war in Afghanistan through three people — a Taliban commander, a US-backed warlord and a village housewife — and let the twenty-year catastrophe show up only in the shape it left on their lives. No Good Men Among the Living (Metropolitan, 2014) was a National Book Award finalist and a Pulitzer finalist in general nonfiction the following year. His New Yorker reporting includes “The Other Afghan Women” (2021), built from months in Helmand villages. Days of Love and Rage (Simon & Schuster, 3 March 2026) follows six ordinary Syrians through the uprising in Manbij in 2011 and 2012 across nearly six hundred pages.

The nearest thing on this page to Okeowo's working method. Both spend years with a small number of civilians in a conflict that the rest of the press covers through officials and body counts, and both refuse the explanatory paragraph — you get the war only in the form of a marriage, a job, a basketball practice, a decision about whether to leave. Both also publish long reported pieces in The New Yorker and then build books out of the same terrain. If you finished A Moonless, Starless Sky wanting the same thing at greater length, this is it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anand Gopal →

02
The same story, told from Nigeria

Helon Habila

Nigerian · The Chibok Girls (2016), Oil on Water (2010)

Habila won the Caine Prize in 2001 and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book, Africa region, in 2003 for Waiting for an Angel. The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria (Columbia Global Reports, 2016) is his one work of reportage: he travelled to Chibok in Borno State, sat with parents of the two hundred and seventy-six schoolgirls taken in April 2014, and set the abduction inside a history of northern Nigeria that the international coverage skipped. Oil on Water (2010), a novel about two journalists in the Niger Delta, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2011. He teaches creative writing at George Mason University.

The direct overlap in subject, from the other side of the byline. Okeowo's Boko Haram chapter and Habila's book cover the same insurgency in the same years, and both are by Nigerian writers who went to the villages rather than the briefings. The difference is useful rather than awkward: Habila is a novelist writing reportage once, so he stays closer to the historical argument, while Okeowo is a reporter throughout and stays closer to the individual week. Read them together and the Chibok story stops being a hashtag.

— Lisanne
03
If you came for the Alabama book

Imani Perry

American · South to America (2022), Black in Blues (2025)

Perry was born in Birmingham in 1972 and teaches at Harvard. South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Ecco, 2022) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and argues that the South is not an exception to the country but its centre; it moves state by state, mixing memoir, history and reporting without announcing which is which. Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (Ecco, 2025) traces indigo, denim, blues music and Yoruba cosmology through Black history and was a Kirkus Prize finalist that year. Her earlier books include Looking for Lorraine (2018) on Lorraine Hansberry.

The closest companion to Blessings and Disasters, and the pairing most readers arriving in 2026 actually want. Two Alabama-born writers with academic careers elsewhere, both driving back into the state with the tools of national journalism and refusing the two available scripts — the South as museum of atrocity, or the South as maligned homeland. Both braid family memory into reported history and let the seams show. Perry covers the whole region; Okeowo stays inside one state and goes further down.

— Lisanne
04
Women inside the movement

Azadeh Moaveni

Iranian-American · Guest House for Young Widows (2019), Lipstick Jihad (2005)

Moaveni covered Iran for Time from Tehran and the Iraq war for the Los Angeles Times. Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS (Random House, 2019) follows thirteen women from Tunisia, Britain, Germany and Syria into the Islamic State and, for those who survived, out of it — treating recruitment as a decision made inside a marriage, a housing situation and a police record rather than as an ideological conversion. She later directed the gender and conflict programme at the International Crisis Group and now teaches journalism at New York University.

The same refusal that organises A Moonless, Starless Sky: an extremist movement reported through the domestic lives of the women caught up in it, with the political explanation withheld until the human one is on the page. Okeowo has an anti-slavery activist and a Somali basketball team; Moaveni has teenagers from Bethnal Green and a Tunisian widow in Raqqa. Both books were criticised in some quarters for making their subjects too comprehensible, which is a fair description of what both are trying to do.

— Lisanne
Every book by Azadeh Moaveni →
05
The one who argues with the genre

Nanjala Nyabola

Kenyan · Travelling While Black (2020), Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics (2018)

Nyabola is a Nairobi-based writer and political analyst with degrees from Birmingham, Oxford and Harvard Law School. Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics (Zed, 2018) is about how the internet reshaped Kenyan politics; Travelling While Black (Hurst, 2020) is an essay collection on race, borders and mobility that was nominated for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Her essay “Why do Western media get Africa wrong?” (Al Jazeera, 2 January 2014) argued that foreign correspondents in Africa reproduce a narrow set of stories regardless of intention; Michela Wrong replied with “In defence of western journalists in Africa” on African Arguments in February 2014, and Nyabola answered again in Al Jazeera on 6 March 2014. She has also written repeatedly against the humanitarian frame in aid and conflict reporting.

The dissenting voice on this page, and the reason to read it alongside the others rather than after them. Nyabola's standing argument is that a story about Africans resisting extremism, published in an American magazine for an American readership, is shaped by that market before a word is written — a charge that lands on Okeowo's first book even though Okeowo is Nigerian-American and lived in Lagos. Nothing here settles that; the two are worth reading against each other precisely because they do not agree about what the work is for.

— Lisanne
06
Africa, and the family in it

Aminatta Forna

Sierra Leonean-Scottish · The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002), The Memory of Love (2010)

Forna's father, Mohamed Sorie Forna, was Sierra Leone's finance minister, was named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and was hanged for treason in 1975, when she was nine. The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002) is her return to Freetown decades later to reconstruct the trial from court records and surviving witnesses, and it is reporting as much as memoir. The Memory of Love (2010) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award; she received a Windham-Campbell Prize in 2014 and an OBE in 2017, and directs the Lannan Center at Georgetown. The Window Seat (2021) collects her essays.

The model for what Okeowo does in 2025 rather than 2017: a writer with a foot in West Africa and a foot in the West, turning the reporting apparatus on her own family and finding that the private story and the national one are the same story. Forna reached that book first and Okeowo reached it second, from Alabama instead of Freetown. Both also work the border between memoir and reportage without letting the memoir soften the evidence.

— Lisanne
07
Before the genre had a name

Zora Neale Hurston

American · Barracoon (written 1931, published 2018), Mules and Men (1935)

Hurston trained as an anthropologist under Franz Boas and spent 1927 and 1928 in Mobile, Alabama, interviewing Kossola, also called Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor of the Clotilda, the ship that landed enslaved Africans in Alabama in 1860, decades after the trade was outlawed. She wrote the interviews up as Barracoon in 1931 and could not place it, in part because she refused to translate Kossola's speech out of dialect; it was published in 2018. Her earlier article on him, “Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver” in The Journal of Negro History (1927), has been shown to be substantially copied from Emma Langdon Roche's Historic Sketches of the Old South (1914); she went back and did her own interviews afterwards, which is what produced the book.

The oldest writer here and the most literally connected to the new one. Kossola's community, Africatown, is a few miles from where Okeowo grew up, and Okeowo has drawn the comparison herself between that settlement and the West African immigrant community her parents built in Alabama a century later. Hurston was also doing something the genre had not yet named: long fieldwork with one person, transcribed at length, with the ethnographer visible on the page. Read Barracoon for the Alabama-to-West-Africa line that Blessings and Disasters picks up.

— Lisanne

Every book by Zora Neale Hurston →

08
The South, and the leaving of it

Isabel Wilkerson

American · The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), Caste (2020)

Wilkerson was Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times and in 1994 became the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House, 2010) tells the Great Migration through three people who left Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana between the 1930s and the 1950s, drawn from more than a thousand interviews; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) argues that American racial hierarchy is best understood as caste, and drew sustained scholarly objection — Charisse Burden-Stelly's “Caste Does Not Explain Race” in Boston Review on 15 December 2020 is the most cited — that the frame displaces capitalism and class. Ava DuVernay filmed her research as Origin (2023).

The reverse journey, and the reason Okeowo's second book has an argument at all. Wilkerson's subject is the six million people who left the South; Blessings and Disasters is about the ones who stayed, and it reads differently once you know what leaving looked like. The method is also shared — a huge interview base compressed into a few people followed at length, with the statistics kept out of the narrative and put in the notes.

— Lisanne

Every book by Isabel Wilkerson →

Authors like Isabel Wilkerson →

09
The road through the sites

Clint Smith

American · How the Word Is Passed (2021), Above Ground (2023)

Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic with a doctorate from Harvard. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown, 1 June 2021) visits Monticello, the Whitney Plantation, Angola prison, Blandford Cemetery, Galveston, New York City and Gorée Island in Senegal, and reports each place through the guides, the tourists and the descendants rather than through the archive. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and the Stowe, Dayton Literary Peace and Hillman prizes. He is also a poet; Above Ground (2023) is about early parenthood.

The same manoeuvre as Blessings and Disasters, done by touring instead of by staying: go to the places where a country stores its version of itself, listen to what is said out loud at each one, and report the gap. Smith ends his American itinerary in West Africa; Okeowo starts in West Africa and ends in Alabama. Both write themselves into the scene without making the book about themselves, and both are more interested in what the guide says to the tour group than in what the plaque says.

— Lisanne
Every book by Clint Smith →
10
The disputed ancestor

Ryszard Kapuściński

Polish · The Shadow of the Sun (1998; English 2001), The Emperor (1978)

For decades Kapuściński was the sole foreign correspondent of the Polish press agency PAP, and he reported from Africa through the independence era and some twenty-seven coups and revolutions. The Shadow of the Sun collects forty years of that work. His accuracy is genuinely contested: John Ryle's “At play in the bush of ghosts” in the Times Literary Supplement of 27 July 2001 documented ethnographic and geographical errors in that book and called the style a form of literary colonialism, and Artur Domosławski's biography Kapuściński Non-Fiction (2010) reported that he had not met Che Guevara or Patrice Lumumba as claimed, that a firing-squad reprieve in the Congo did not happen, and that he had a working relationship with Polish intelligence. Defenders answer that he wrote in a Polish tradition where reportage is openly literary; he never fully reconciled the two positions himself.

The ancestor of this whole form and the reason its rules got written. Kapuściński established that a foreign correspondent could write a continent through smells, rooms and single encounters rather than through datelines, which is the register Okeowo works in — and the objections raised against him from 2001 onward are exactly the objections a book like A Moonless, Starless Sky is built to survive: named subjects, checkable events, no composite characters. Read him for the range of the form and for what the argument about it is actually about.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ryszard Kapuściński →

Authors like Ryszard Kapuściński →

Where to start if you loved Alexis Okeowo

If you want the closest match in method, read Anand Gopal.

No Good Men Among the Living. Twenty years of war in Afghanistan, visible only through three lives.

If you want the same Nigerian story, read Helon Habila.

The Chibok Girls. The 2014 abductions, reported from Borno State by a Nigerian novelist.

If you came for the Alabama book, read Imani Perry.

South to America. Birmingham-born, National Book Award, the whole region rather than one state.

If you want women inside an extremist movement, read Azadeh Moaveni.

Guest House for Young Widows. Thirteen women into the Islamic State, and out again.

If you want the argument against all of it, read Nanjala Nyabola.

Travelling While Black. On who gets to narrate Africa, and for which audience.

If you want more reporting like this

My shelf of investigative journalism has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Alexis Okeowo

Who should I read if I like Alexis Okeowo?

Anand Gopal is the closest on method — years with a few civilians, the war visible only in what it did to their households. Helon Habila's The Chibok Girls covers the same Nigerian insurgency from inside Nigeria. If you came to Okeowo through Blessings and Disasters rather than the Africa reporting, Imani Perry and Clint Smith are the two to start with. Azadeh Moaveni matches the reporting on women inside extremist movements, and Nanjala Nyabola is the writer who disputes the premise of the whole genre.

What is Alexis Okeowo's new book about?

Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama, published by Henry Holt on 5 August 2025, is part memoir and part reported history of the state Okeowo grew up in. It reports Alabama through people left out of its official story: members of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, who avoided removal and now argue with the state over sovereignty and their businesses; Africatown near Mobile, founded by the last Africans brought illegally into the country aboard the Clotilda in 1860; the West African immigrant community that Okeowo's Nigerian parents helped build in Montgomery; and Alabamians of several generations who chose to stay in a state most of the country has written off. It is the first book in which the reporter appears on the page.

What should I read first by Alexis Okeowo?

A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa (2017) if you want the reporting, and Blessings and Disasters (2025) if you want the writer. The first is four self-contained stories — a couple who met in captivity under the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, an anti-slavery activist in Mauritania, a women's basketball team in Mogadishu, and a vigilante fighting Boko Haram in northern Nigeria — and any one of them works as a sample. The New Yorker archive is free to browse and is the cheapest way to test the prose.

Did A Moonless, Starless Sky win any awards?

Yes. It won the PEN Open Book Award in 2018, the prize PEN America gives to a book by an author of colour. It was published by Grand Central on 3 October 2017, runs to about 256 pages in hardcover, and appeared on several best-of-year lists. Okeowo has separately been named journalist of the year by the Newswomen's Club of New York in 2020 and received the Reed Environmental Writing Award in 2022, and pieces have been anthologised in both The Best American Travel Writing and The Best American Sports Writing for 2017.

Is Alexis Okeowo Nigerian or American?

Both, and the books turn on it. Okeowo is American, born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, to parents who emigrated from Nigeria, and graduated from Princeton in 2006. After a Princeton in Africa fellowship at a Ugandan newspaper, Okeowo was based in Lagos from 2012 to 2015 and reported across the continent before joining The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. A Moonless, Starless Sky comes out of the Lagos years and Blessings and Disasters out of the Alabama ones, and the second book is partly about the racial limbo of being Black but not Black American in the Deep South.

What are the best books about ordinary people living under extremism?

Okeowo's A Moonless, Starless Sky (2017) and Anand Gopal's No Good Men Among the Living (2014) are the two to start with, because both report a war through civilians rather than through combatants or officials. Azadeh Moaveni's Guest House for Young Widows (2019) does the same for the women who joined the Islamic State. Helon Habila's The Chibok Girls (2016) covers the Boko Haram kidnappings from Borno State. Gopal's Days of Love and Rage (2026) follows six Syrians through the uprising in Manbij and is the most recent addition to the shelf.

Are there African writers doing this kind of reporting?

Several, and they are not all doing the same thing. Helon Habila reported The Chibok Girls in Nigeria; Aminatta Forna reconstructed her father's 1975 execution in Sierra Leone in The Devil That Danced on the Water; Nanjala Nyabola writes from Nairobi on technology, migration and, pointedly, on how foreign correspondents narrate the continent. Reading Nyabola alongside Okeowo is the more interesting exercise, because Nyabola's long-running argument is that the market a story is written for shapes it before the reporting starts.

Is Ryszard Kapuściński trustworthy?

Not straightforwardly, and that is worth knowing before you read him. He was the great literary reporter of decolonising Africa and the model for much of what came after, but John Ryle documented factual and ethnographic errors in The Shadow of the Sun in the Times Literary Supplement on 27 July 2001, and Artur Domosławski's 2010 biography reported that several famous episodes did not happen and that Kapuściński had a working relationship with Polish intelligence. His defenders point to a Polish tradition in which reportage is avowedly literary. Read him for what the form can do, and read the criticism next to him; the contrast with a book like Okeowo's, where subjects are named and events are checkable, is the whole point.

What is the difference between Blessings and Disasters and other books about the South?

Most of them are written by people who left. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns follows three people out of the South; Clint Smith tours the sites where the country stores its memory of slavery. Okeowo's book is about staying, and about a version of the state that the official story leaves out entirely: Native Alabamians who avoided removal, a settlement founded by the last people brought over on a slave ship, and African immigrants who arrived voluntarily in the 1970s and 1980s. Imani Perry's South to America is the nearest companion, and the two make a good pair because Perry takes the whole region and Okeowo takes one state.

Where can I read Alexis Okeowo's journalism for free?

In The New Yorker, where Okeowo has been a staff writer since 2015 and where much of the reporting behind both books first appeared; the contributor archive lists everything. Earlier work ran in Bloomberg Businessweek, the Financial Times weekend magazine and The New York Times Magazine. Several of the reported pieces are also collected in The Best American Travel Writing 2017 and The Best American Sports Writing 2017, which most libraries hold.

Sources

List last reviewed 5 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“I wanted to talk about the things that are left out of the state's story and the experiences of people who decide to stay there despite so many people writing Alabama off.”

— Alexis Okeowo on Blessings and Disasters, interviewed by Emily Kwong, NPR, 10 August 2025.

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