When Nnedi Okorafor was 19, she woke up disoriented in a hospital room. Fluorescent pink and green grasshoppers and praying mantises bounced around her hospital bed, making strange clicks. An enormous crow threw itself against the window, trying to break in.

Once she was no longer hallucinating from pain medication, though, things got stranger and scarier: She tried to get out of bed, and found she couldn’t move her legs. Okorafor soon learned that she was paralyzed from the waist down from nerve damage that occurred during back surgery for scoliosis.

A star athlete and pre-med college student, Okorafor lost her faith in medicine, and felt alienated from her own body. “It was a death of who I was going to be,” she said of the paralysis. It was also a rebirth of sorts.

She retreated into her imagination, and from her hospital bed started sketching a story about a Nigerian woman who didn’t need to walk because she could fly. Later, after she had regained most of the sensation in her legs, learned to walk again and returned to college, she enrolled in writing classes.

Thirty years and more than twenty books later, Okorafor, now an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer, is exploring that traumatic experience, and the transformation that followed, in her heavily autobiographical new novel, “Death of the Author.”

A genre-defying metafictional experiment, the story centers on a Nigerian American writer from Chicago named Zelu, who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair after a childhood accident. She dreams of becoming a writer, but her lovingly overprotective parents and siblings are skeptical that she’ll ever support herself. After struggling for years to get published, Zelu writes a best-selling postapocalyptic novel set among sentient robots in a future Nigeria, and lands a seven-figure advance and a movie deal. Her sudden rise to fame is both thrilling and jarring, as Zelu sees her success disrupt her family, and her novel get whitewashed by Hollywood executives who strip it of the African elements.