Longthroat Memoirs

From Yemisi Aribisala, the 2026 Fortnum & Mason Food Writer of the Year and winner of the John Avery Award: a Nigerian food memoir unlike any you've read.

Longthroat Memoirs explores Nigerian cuisine through lyrical essays connecting food to memory, desire, identity and the unruly beauty of Lagos. Yemisi Aribisala writes about pepper soup and pounded yam not as recipes but as portals into Nigerian culture — the arguments over dinner tables, the sensuality of cooking, the way food carries history and longing. This isn't food porn or cookbook; it's food writing as literature, revealing Nigerian cuisine's complexity whilst interrogating colonialism's impact on how African food is seen and valued.

Yemisi Aribisala is a Nigerian writer who became the first African and first Black writer to win the prestigious John Avery Award for food writing. Her essays blend literary craft with deep knowledge of Nigerian cooking traditions, creating food writing that transcends genre. Critics call her work "breathtakingly original" — food memoir that makes you rethink what food writing can do.

Essential reading for food memoir lovers, anyone interested in Nigerian culture, and readers seeking writing that makes food inseparable from identity, desire and memory. If you think you don't like food writing, this book will change your mind — it's literature that happens to be about Nigerian cuisine rather than a recipe collection disguised as memoir.