“Writing is a radical act of self-love, a transformative space where the intermingling of my lived experiences and my wild imagination produces worlds that beat from the fringes into the centre.”
novelist, short story writer, poet
I Wish I’d Written Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard
‘the phantasmagorical journey of an alcoholic man in his hunt for his dead palm-wine tapster’
Why I Write
‘every book is its own wild landscape, living and breathing inside the body before spilling out like marrow from the pen’
On Myth Making
‘Medusa as a Gorgon became a feminist icon of sorts, for to look at her is to be reduced to stone from one withering stare’
Irenosen Okojie in conversation with Gabriel Gbadamosi
Irenosen Okojie talks to Gabriel Gbadamosi about the alchemy of writing in the early hours and the power of stories to heal. She discusses challenging the stigma of mental ill health in literature and pouring love into Afrofuturism through her project, Black to the Future.
Biography
Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British author whose work pushes the boundaries of form, language and ideas. Her novel Butterfly Fish (2015) and short story collections Speak Gigantular (2016) and Nudibranch (2019) have won and been nominated for multiple awards. Her latest novel is Curandera (2024). Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, Observer, Guardian and Huffington Post. She was a Contributing Editor for The White Review and The Review by WritersMosaic and Jhalak.
She co-presented the BBC podcast Turn Up for The Books and has judged various literary prizes, most recently the Dublin Literary Award, BBC National Short Story Award and 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she was awarded an MBE For Services to Literature in 2021. She is the founder and director of Black to the Future, a multidisciplinary Afrofuturist festival.
