Cole established his innovative style of art-inflected writing and criticism, often embedded in autofiction but no less laser-sharp and academically piercing, by accident; his training as an art historian of Dutch painting going wayward while writing on a trip to Lagos in 2005. The breakthrough was Open City, the 2011 novel that made his name, and ‘a bellwether of the last decade’s autofictional turn’, as The New Yorker wrote recently. With publication of Tremor, the overlaps between plot and art are even more acute: Tunde, a Nigerian photographer teaching at an Ivy League university, tries to photograph a street at night, but is interrupted by a suspicious (white) homeowner and shooed away. The resulting intricate meditation on the act of looking, concentrating, who gets to see what and from what perspective (with a cameo for Otobong Nkanga’s soap-production project) is why artists increasingly turn to his work for insight. When Tunde speaks, we can imagine Cole’s own thoughts. Cole teaches in the Harvard English department, as well writing for The New York Times (where he produced a photography column until 2019).