francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, storyteller, and multidisciplinary artist born in Lagos, Nigeria. In 2022, she was awarded the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers for her debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020). Butter Honey Pig Bread was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin Literary Award.

CBC’s Canada Reads, an annual “Battle of the Books,” selected Butter Honey Pig Bread as one of five contenders in 2021 for “the one book that all of Canada should read.” The novel made it to the grand finale, where it placed second.

​francesca co-authored Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements in 2023. Curious Sounds is a collaborative experimental non-fiction book with Roger Mooking.

Her short fiction, essays, and criticism have been published in Winter Tangerine Review, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, the Malahat Review, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, GUTS magazine, the Puritan, Canadian Art, C-Mag, Chatelaine Existere, and elsewhere. Her short story Ọrun is Heaven, was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize, and An Immortal Woman was shortlisted for the Yolk Magazine’s 2024 Montreal Fiction Prize.

francesca has participated in residencies at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, ARTEXTE, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and Centre for Arts Tapes. She has been a writer in residence at Queens University and the University of Winnipeg. francesca's art, short films, and writing have been shown and screened at Hermes Gallery, Nocturne Halifax, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Black Film Fest, Durham Region International Film Festival (DRIFF), and elsewhere. ​