 In autumn 2014 the University of Tübingen welcomed him and his fellow writers Taiye Selasi, Priya Basil and Chika Unigwe and to that year's Writers' Lectureship, all of them writers representing what Selasi calls Afropolitan Literature.In 2014–15, Parkes was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales.He was selected as one of Africa's 39 most promising authors under the age of 40 for the World Book Capital Africa39 project in 2014.