Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer and novelist. Herdebut novel, The Edge of Water (Tin House Books, 2025), is the winner of the Westport Prize for Literature, winner of the Ploughshares John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and a Best Book of the Year at TIME Magazine, Apple Books, Debutiful, Electric Literature, Chicago Review of Books, Well-Read Black Girl, and more. It has been widely praised, including by Oprah Daily, Goodreads,Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, Brittle Paper, The Root, and The Lagos Review. The Edge of Water has also been named finalist for the New American Voices Award, Oregon Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Book Awards, and longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. A graduate of Harvard LawSchool, Bankole's work has appeared in various publications, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, Poets & Writers, 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, and a residency-fellowship from the Sitka Center for Artand Ecology.  She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.

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