Young Nigerian women authors to keep an eye on

Daily Trust on Sunday looks at some of the most promising female writers blazing the trail with their books published in 2017.   Chibundo Onuzo Chibundu is not a stranger to all the cool list you can think of. Since her debut novel The Spider King’s Daughter was snapped up by Faber and Faber in […]

Daily Trust on Sunday looks at some of the most promising female writers blazing the trail with their books published in 2017.

Chibundo Onuzo

The Spider King’s Daughter has been nominated for several prizes, one being the Dylan Thomas Prize. She was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Litearture. And in 2014 she was listed by the Hay Festival in the Africa39 list of the most promising African Writers under 40.

The thing is Chibundu has a long way to go before she hits 40. She is still only 25 (b.1991) and already her second novel, Welcome To Lagos has been published by the same publishers and features an amazing cover art by Bill Bragg.

For someone so young, Onuzo’s voice is matured and witty. And her knowledge and experience of life showcased in Welcome to Lagos conveys the author’s deep love for this city where she was born and grew up in.

Welcome to Lagos is the story of five Nigerians Chike and Yemi desert the army, and team up with Fineboy, who deserts the militants to head to Lagos in the hope of becoming a DJ. Isoken carries the burden of coming close to being raped by some militants, that may have included Fineboy, and Oma is on the run from her abusive husband. They arrive Lagos and take up residence in an abandoned building belonging to a politician. One night the politician escaping the law turns up at the property with a bag of looted public funds. The vagabonds cease the politician and his money and decide to live a little. 

The bevy of characters and their stories reflect the bustling nature of Lagos and the moral dilemma they find themselves in, the contrast that Lagos is: good and evil, beauty and the beast, all rolled into one.

Onuzo brings her trademark humour and sarcasm into the story-telling and delivers social critic with nuance and biting humour. When she is done with her PhD from King’s College, London, hopefully Onuzo would have her third novel ready.

Ayobami Adebayo

Ayobami Adebayo’s rise to prominence was steady. She was the fiction editor for the brilliant and daring venture Saraba Magazine, which provided a platform for many African writers to showcase their works online. 

At 29, she released her debut novel, Stay With Me, which she has been working on for sometime and the book had an auspicious outing, being nominated for the Bailey’s Women Prize a few weeks after it’s release. She went on to make the shortlist of three and lost out to Naomi Alderman’s brilliant novel, The Power.

Adebayo was born in Lagos and grew up in the university town of Ile Ife. She was educated at the famous Obafemi Awolowo Unviersity and the University of East Anglia, the in UK where she did an MFA in creative writing.

By 2013, her novel manuscript was shortlisted for the Kwani Manuscript Prize, losing to the phenomenal Kintu, by Jennifer Makumbi. Adebayo bent down and worked on her manuscript, polishing it to near perfection.

Stay With Me is a story of Yejide and Akin’s marriage and the troubles they endure to have a child. For Yejide, the perfect marriage, tainted already by a lack of child, is further damaged when Akin agrees to take a second wife Funmi. But that is only the beginning of the intensely moving drama that is Stay With Me, which absorbs the reader from the beginning to the very end with its sensitive and emotional portrayal of these beautiful and deeply flawed characters.

Adebayo, a first time novelist, debuts with a matured voice and a compelling story that will continue to resonate. So compelling it was that the famed Michiko Kakutani of the the New York Times, who had given many a writer torrid nights with her scathing reviews gave Stay With Me a very good review, in her last act before leaving the New York Times.

Chances are that if you have read a story about a childless couple before, you haven’t read one as compelling and emotionally investing as this one.

Adebayo though is only starting and is already being recognised. She has been a writer in residence at Ledig House Omi, Hedgebrook, Sinthian Cultural Institute, Ox-Bow School of Art, Seinna Art Institute and the Ebedi Writers Residency. She has also been shortlisted a couple of times for the Miles Morland Scholarship.

With such a forceful and winning debut, one can only lookout for what Adebayo has in store in the next few years. Her ability to take a clichéd story of a childless married couple and turning it into something fresh and compelling is a sign of things to come.

And yes, Adebayo had studied with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Booker Prize winner Magaret Atwood. 

Lesley Nneka Aarimah

If for some reason you haven’t heard of Lesley Nneka Arimah yet, then you need to sit up and take note. This is a writer storming her way to prominence with a slew of awards under her belt already, the latest, clinched just last week, is the $50,000 Kirkus Fiction Prize beating other notable authors to the prize.

Arimah was born in London to Nigerian parents who moved around a lot as often as their work dictated. She grew up in Nigeria and wherever work took her parents to.

Her short stories have been published in reputable platforms like The New Yorker and Granta and have been twice shortlisted for the Caine Prize, won the Commonwealth Prize and she has also won a number of grants for her works.

Her debut, What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is an exploration of the sometimes unusual lives in Nigeria, and the US, where the author now lives, centring mostly on women and their place in society.

She explores different genres, mostly speculative, sometimes magical or post-apocalyptic. She does have range, that is for sure. And one thing she also has is an overriding sense of bleakness, which comes through some of the short stories. Her widely praised collection is something sure worth reading.

Of the stories and world she creates, Arimah said in  interview: “That act of taking the familiar and locating it in a strange place creates an interesting juxtaposition where the familiar, the normal, can become grotesque out of context. That’s one of the reasons fabulist stories appeal to me, that we can take something from our world and see how it behaves in a different one.”