Wilfred Kanu Jr., known professionally as Freddy Will, a Sierra Leonean-American author, emcee, and independent publisher based in Berlin, Germany, has been nominated for the International Recognition Award at the Influencer Magazine Awards 2026. The nomination recognises his extraordinary career spanning two decades across music, literature, and publishing, during which he has built an independent catalog of books and albums that draw from West African griot tradition, oral history, and cultural memory. He is the founder of Badson Publishing, Swift Nightz Music Society, and The Theatre of Literary & Performing Arts, and holds a Grammy nomination as the first Sierra Leonean nominee, alongside four commemorative Sierra Leone postage stamps bearing his likeness . His career has carried him from Toronto to Brussels to Berlin, building an independent catalog of books and albums across two decades, each one paired with its own companion record.
His current flagship work is Bee Mann, an Afrofuturist superhero mythology told across a trilogy of books and their companion albums, built from griot storytelling tradition, hip-hop, family, and Sierra Leonean and diasporic cosmology. Book One, Stings from a One-Man Hive, published in 2026 alongside its companion double album, with the mythology continuing through a third LP, Devils May Cry, and two further books completing the trilogy in 2027 . Constructed from his own image, his own family, and his own biography, Bee Mann is not simply Wilfred’s newest project, it is the mythology his entire career has been building toward. His writing draws from the West African griot tradition, oral history, cultural memory, and the responsibility to tell the truth of a people. That tradition runs through everything: the Afrofuturist mythology of the Bee Mann series, the griot-registered nonfiction of Block Lore, the literary paranormal of You Can’t Ghost the Dead, and the Afropolitan memoir mapping his passage through the world.
In Bee Mann, his most recent venture, Freddy Will brings that same sensibility to audiences: raw, layered, cinematic. The book is an annotated poetry collection and Afrofuturist origin story that follows the Bee Mann, an interplanetary superhero built from his own biography, across twenty-five poems in three movements. It travels from a market in West Africa to the streets of New Jersey, from the diplomatic halls of Brussels to Times Square, from the Wannsee estate in Berlin to the Null Plane, the dimension of pure silence from which no one returns unchanged. Each chapter opens with a griot-register annotation that is part mythological epic, part cultural criticism, part intimate memoir. Founder of Badson Publishing, distributed through African Books Collective, his work is available across multiple countries and continents. Multiple published titles, eight countries, one voice. Wilfred Kanu Jr. is a Sierra Leonean-American author, Grammy-nominated emcee, producer, and publisher. Born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, raised across West Africa and North America, now rooted in Berlin, Germany.
His Grammy nomination came from his work on the 2010 charity children’s album “Healthy Food for Thought: Good Enough to Eat,” a double CD produced by the New York Coalition for Healthy School Foods that featured notable artists including Moby, Julian Lennon, and Russell Simmons. This nomination made him the first Sierra Leonean hip-hop artist to work on a musical work selected for a Grammy. His literary achievements are equally significant, with eight albums and twenty books published independently over his career. Some of his existing titles include My Book of Chrymes, The Dark Road from Romarond, Hip Hop Kru Zade: Path Beyond Clichés, Crime Rhymez, Theatre Dance & Poetry, Brazenitout (volumes one through four), Theatre Dance & Poetry: A Return to Love, and The Sandmann’s Journal.
His work has also been recognised by the Sierra Leonean government, which approved four “limited edition” postage stamps bearing his likeness, making him the first Sierra Leonean musician who is also a published author to receive such an honour. His nomination for the International Recognition Award at IMA 2026 celebrates his extraordinary contributions to music, literature, and publishing across multiple continents, and his unwavering commitment to amplifying African voices and narratives through his work. From his early days as a displaced youth fleeing civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone to his current role as an internationally recognised author, emcee, and publisher, Wilfred Kanu Jr. has consistently demonstrated the qualities of a true global artist: resilience, innovation, and a deep commitment to cultural preservation and storytelling. His legacy is defined not only by the books and albums he has created but by the voices he has amplified and the cultural bridges he has built across the African diaspora.
