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Post by Shymmex on Dec 4, 2015 19:37:08 GMT
Helen Oyeyemi
 Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and has lived in London from the age of four.. In 2013 she was included in the Granta Best Of Young British Novelists list. Oyeyemi wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while still at school studying for her A levels at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School. While studying social and political sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, two of her plays, Juniper's Whitening and Victimese, were performed by fellow students to critical acclaim and subsequently published by Methuen. In 2007 Bloomsbury published Oyeyemi's second novel, The Opposite House, which is inspired by Cuban mythology. Her third novel, White is for Witching, described as having "roots in Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe" was published by Picador in May 2009. It was a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award. A fourth novel, Mr Fox, was published by Picador in June 2011, and a fifth, Boy, Snow, Bird in 2014. In 2009 Oyeyemi was recognized as one of the women on Venus Zine’s "25 under 25" list. Oyeyemi was a judge on the Booktrust Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2015, and is serving as a judge for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Oyeyemi is a lifelong Catholic who has done voluntary work for CAFOD in Kenya Awards 2013 Granta ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, Winner 2009 Shirley Jackson Award, Finalist
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Post by Shymmex on Dec 4, 2015 19:38:28 GMT
Taiye Selasi
 Taiye Selasi (born 2 November 1979) is a writer and photographer. Of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin, she prefers to describe herself as being a local of New York, Rome, and Accra. Taiye Selasi was born in London, England, and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, the elder of twin daughters in a family of physicians. Her given name means first twin in her mother's native Yoruba. Selasi's twin sister, Dr. Yetsa Kehinde Tuakli, is a physiatrist in the US, and an alumna of the African Paralympics, in which she competed in the long jump for Ghana's national team. Selasi's mother, Dr. Juliette Tuakli, is a paediatrician in Ghana. Renowned for her advocacy of children's rights, she sits on the board of United Way. Selasi's father, Dr. Lade Wosornu, is a surgeon in Saudi Arabia. Considered one of Ghana's foremost public intellectuals, he has published numerous volumes of poetry. Selasi's parents broke up when she was an infant. She met her biological father at the age of 12. Selasi graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in American Studies from Yale, and earned her MPhil in International Relations from Nuffield College, Oxford In 2005 The LIP Magazine published "Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)", Selasi's seminal text on Afropolitans. The same year she penned a play, which was produced at a small theatre by Dr. Avery Willis, Toni Morrison's niece. In 2006 Morrison gave Selasi a one-year deadline; she wrote "The Sex Lives of African Girls" to meet it. The story, published by UK literary magazine Granta in 2011, appears in Best American Short Stories 2012. In 2010 Ann Godoff at Penguin Press bought Selasi's unfinished novel. Ghana Must Go was published in 2013 to much critical acclaim. Selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, it has been sold in 22 countries as of 2014. In 2013 Selasi was selected as one of Granta′s 20 Best Young British Writers and in 2014 named to the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers under the age of 40 "with the potential and talent to define trends in African literature." Selasi collaborates frequently with fellow artists. In 2012 she partnered with architect David Adjaye to create the Gwangju River Reading Room, an open-air library erected in 2013 as part of the Gwangju Biennale's Folly II. With director Teddy Goitom, founder of Stocktown, Selasi is Executive Producer of Afripedia, a documentary series about urban African creatives. With producers Fernando Meirelles and Hank Levine (City of God), Selasi is developing Exodus, a feature documentary about global migration
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Post by Shymmex on Dec 4, 2015 23:50:46 GMT
Teju Cole
 Teju Cole (born June 27, 1975) is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian.. Born Obayemi Babajide Adetokunbo Onafuwa, Cole was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Nigerian parents, and is the oldest of four children. Cole and his mother returned to Lagos, Nigeria shortly after his birth, where his father joined them after receiving his MBA from Western Michigan University. Cole moved back to the United States at the age of 17 to attend Western Michigan University for one year, then transferred to Kalamazoo College, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1996. After dropping out of medical school at the University of Michigan, Cole enrolled in an African art history program at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, then pursued a doctorate in art history at Columbia University. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Awards and honors 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Open City 2012 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner for Open City 2011 Time magazine's "Best Books of the Year" for Open City 2012 Ondaatje Prize shortlist for Open City 2012 The Morning News Tournament of Books finalist 2013 International Literature Award for the German-language translation by Christine Richter-Nilsson of Open City 2015 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Fiction) valued at $150,000
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Post by Shymmex on Dec 4, 2015 23:52:38 GMT
Biyi Bandele
 Biyi Bandele (born Biyi Bandele-Thomas; 13 October 1967) is a Nigerian novelist, playwright and filmmaker. Bandele is regarded as one of the most versatile and prolific of the UK-based Nigerian writers, having turned his hand to theatre, journalism, television, film and radio, as well as the fiction with which he made his name. He lives in London, where he moved in 1990. Bandele was born to Yoruba parents in Kafanchan, Kaduna State, Nigeria in 1967. His father Solomon Bamidele Thomas was a veteran of the Burma Campaign in World War 2, while Nigeria was still part of the British Empire. Bandele spent the first 18 years of his life in the northern part of the country being most at home in the Hausa cultural tradition. Described as a precocious child, Bandele had early ambitions to be a writer and when he was 14 years old won a short-story competition. Later on, he moved to Lagos, then in 1987 studied drama at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. He won the International Student Playscript competition of 1989 with an unpublished play, Rain, before claiming the 1990 British Council Lagos Award for an unpublished collection of poems. When that year, aged 22, he went to London, invited to a theatre festival, he had with him the manuscripts of two novels he had written. Soon after he arrived in the UK he had found a publisher and been given a commission by the Royal Court Theatre Awards 1989 – International Student Playscript Competition – Rain 1994 – London New Play Festival – Two Horsemen 1995 – Wingate Scholarship Award 1998 – Peggy Ramsay Award 2000 – EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Best Play – Oroonoko
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Post by IrekeOnibudo on Dec 5, 2015 13:54:21 GMT
Shymmex, where is the scoop on Diran Adebayo?
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Post by Shymmex on Dec 5, 2015 13:55:51 GMT
Shymmex , where is the scoop on Diran Adebayo? I haven't really heard about him. But I'll look for him now. Thanks, Sir. |
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Post by IrekeOnibudo on Dec 5, 2015 13:58:10 GMT
Shymmex , where is the scoop on Diran Adebayo? I haven't really heard about him. But I'll look for him now. Thanks, Sir. He is Dotun Adebayo's younger brother. You know Dotun who runs a radio show on the Beeb? A former columnist of the Voice newspaper? First book he wrote after his time at Oxford was called 'Some Kind of Black'. He has written more since, although that's the only one I got to read. |
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Post by IrekeOnibudo on Dec 5, 2015 14:00:47 GMT
By the way, I have got to commend you for all the archival work you have done some far.
Overnight we appeared to have built an accesible repository of information, with few glitches.
Much respect bro.
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Post by Shymmex on Dec 5, 2015 14:04:24 GMT
I haven't really heard about him. But I'll look for him now. Thanks, Sir. He is Dotun Adebayo's younger brother. You know Dotun who runs a radio show on the Beeb? A former columnist of the Voice newspaper? First book he wrote after his time at Oxford was called 'Some Kind of Black'. He has written more since, although that's the only one I got to read. Yes. I know who you're talking about now. I remember him now. I think I posted his profile on the old commonwealth thread. |
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Post by Shymmex on Dec 5, 2015 14:08:03 GMT
Diran Adebayo Diran Adebayo was born in London in 1968 to Nigerian parents.
He read Law at Oxford University and worked as a journalist on the London newspaper The Voice, before working in television as a researcher and assistant producer. The manuscript of his novel Some Kind of Black won the inaugural Saga Prize, set up by the actress and novelist Marsha Hunt for black-British writers. The prize included a publishing contract with London publishers Virago, who published the book in 1996. The book centres on Dele, a young black student living in Britain, and his attempt to reconcile his experiences at university in Oxford, his Nigerian roots, and his exploits in urban London, where he explores the music scene, experiments with drugs and becomes involved in black activism after his sister is arrested. The book also won the Author's Club Best Novel of the Year award, a Betty Trask Award and a Writers' Guild Award (New Writer of the Year) in 1996. His second novel, My Once Upon a Time (2000), is a modern day fable set in London's near future.
He has also contributed to Underwords: The Hidden City (2005), the Book Trust London Short Story Competition Anthology.Diran Adebayo is currently at work on a screenplay, Burnt, for FilmFour, and his third novel. He lives in London.
Critical perspective
The publication of Some Kind of Black (1996), Adebayo's multi award winning debut novel signals the arrival of a significant new literary talent on the London scene. Adebayo's stylish, hedonistic prose is tempered by a sensitive, self-critical intelligence that stops it growing tired, or superficial. His sharp eye for current trends and fashions - speech patterns, dress, drugs, music, turns of phrase - make him what one critic calls 'the leading writer of the Now Generation'. Adebayo's perceptive insights on British and Black British contemporary culture have also earned him a reputation as an insightful journalist, as his recent 12 page article on 'Race in Britain' The Observer (25 November 2001) testifies.Yet for all its 'street-wise' rhetoric, Adebayo's fiction is ultimately more interesting for the way in which it rejects the latest fads and fashions. If in recent years Black has become a fashionable commodity (witness the proliferation of 'ethnic' accessories on the white European body) then Adebayo's Some Kind of Black, is on one level a parody and critique of that trend. As the title suggests, this text is an experimentation with and interrogation of what it means to be Black; rather than an attempt to buy into or market a true, authentic Blackness.Some Kind of Black is a semi-autobiographical tale, a narrative that fizzes with energy. It tells the story of Dele, a history undergraduate who moves back and forth between Oxford and London in search of sex, parties and good times. Dele's character represents a break with the archetypal 'victim' of early Black fiction. Exploiting his ethnicity in order to take advantage of his white middle-class peers, Dele is presented performing various roles, 'donning different hats to see how they fitted'. Beneath the surface excesses of this street-smart, care free narrator however, is a more complex character. For all his machismo and posturing, Dele is a vulnerable figure, who is both concerned about the welfare of his sickle cell suffering sister (Dapo) and who himself suffers at the hands of a violent father. When Dapo falls into a coma while in police custody (following the arrest of Dele, his sister and friend Concrete), the protagonist is forced to assess the relationship between the liberatory role-playing in which he has been indulging and a more militant Black politics.Adebayo's second (and latest) novel My Once Upon a Time (2000) is a more ambitious, inventive, polished piece of work than Some Kind of Black. Where the plot of the first book has a tendency to loose direction, My Once Upon a Time is a tightly structured text that captures the reader with its confident and skilful deployment of suspense. Working within, while at the same time extending and subverting the conventions of the thriller genre, My Once Upon a Time (again, the title provides the reader with a significant clue) is a self-reflexive narrative, a tale about telling tales. But what kind of tale is this? As well as a detective story, My Once Upon a Time is part sci-fi (set in London in the near future), part mythical quest and part fairy tale (with its 'once upon a time' allusions to Cinderella). The plot centres on Boy, a Private Investigator who is offered a small fortune to find a bride for a millionaire client. As the story progresses it becomes increasingly unclear as to whether Boy is the hunter or the hunted, however. His search takes us on a compelling journey through the back streets and high spots of the metropolis. While the dark, underworld settings through which Boy moves will be familiar to the reader of detective fiction, My Once Upon a Time is much more than a clever quotation from earlier urban fictions. Adebayo re-invents the capital on a scale that has rarely been seen since Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners of the 1950s. In his poetic descriptions of the bridges over the Thames or his comic vision of Ice Cream, an all-inclusive Black life style resort deep in the W9s, Adebayo imagines the city anew, defamiliarising its well-trodden spaces so that we are compelled to take another look. His metropolis is brought alive by a rich cast of characters, including Sundays, Merciless, Sinbad and Mad Phantom, not to mention the mysterious Race Man. My Once Upon a Time is a powerful, confident novel which confirms Adebayo's reputation as one of the most original artistic talents of his generation.Dr James Procter, 2002
Read less
Bibliography
2009Ox-Tails: Air
2005Underwords: The Hidden City
2003New Writing 12
2000My Once Upon a Time
1996Some Kind of Black
Awards
1997Betty Trask Award
1996Authors' Club Best Novel of the Year
1996Writers' Guild Award (New Writer of the Year)
1995Saga Prize
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Post by Her Highness on Dec 21, 2015 4:44:43 GMT
Femi Oke
Femi was born in Britain to Nigerian parents of the Yoruba ethnic group. She is a graduate of Birmingham University where she received a bachelor's degree in English literature and language. Femi began her career at age 14 working as a junior reporter for the United Kingdom's first talk radio station London Broadcasting Company. During 1993, Femi worked for a cable station called Wire TV, this was pre-Janet Street Porter's L!VE TV. Femi presented several shows for the station, including the popular Soap on the Wire on a Saturday afternoon, with soap opera expert Chris Stacey. In the early 1990s, Femi presented the BBC's flagship educational science programme Science In Action and was also a presenter of Top of the Pops. She has also worked for GMTV, London Weekend Television, Men & Motors and Carlton Television. She is a former anchor for CNN International's World Weather service at the network's global headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.[1] She presented weather segments for the programs Your World Today and World News. She also regularly hosted Inside Africa, now fronted by Errol Barnett, a programme that looks into the economic, social and cultural affairs and trends in Africa. She joined CNN in 1999, and worked there until 2008. She used to appear as a daily newscaster, contributor and interviewer on Public Radio International/WNYC's morning public radio news program, The Takeaway. Currently, she hosts The Stream on Al Jazeera English. She has accepted an invitation to teach on behalf of the World Meteorological Organization in Buenos Aires, Argentina, conducted guest lectures for the University of Liberia, Emory University in Atlanta and been a guest speaker at the United Nations, addressing the World Food Programme in Rome, Italy 
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Post by Shymmex on Jan 14, 2016 14:49:00 GMT
Sarah Ladipo Manyika
 Sarah Ladipo Manyika (born 7 March 1968) is an Anglo-Nigerian writer. Early life
Sarah was born and raised in Nigeria. She has also lived in Kenya, France, and England. Her father is Nigerian and her mother is British. Sarah inherited her maiden name (Ladipo) from her father who was born in Ibadan (South West Nigeria) in the late 1930s. Sarah's father met and married her mother in the UK in the late 1960s. She spent much of her childhood in Lagos and the city of Jos in Plateau State. As a young teenager, Sarah lived for two years in Nairobi, Kenya, before her family moved to the UK. Career
She studied at the Universities of Birmingham (UK), Bordeaux (France), and Berkeley (California). She was married in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1994 and now divides her time between San Francisco (where she teaches literature at San Francisco State University), London and Harare. Her writing includes published essays, academic papers, book reviews and short stories. Sarah's first novel, In Dependence, was published by Legend Press in 2008. Her short story "Mr Wonder" appeared in the 2008 collection Women Writing Zimbabwe. Sarah's novel In Dependence was chosen by the UK's largest bookstore chain as its featured book for Black History Month. In 2009, In Dependence, was published by Cassava Republic, a literary press based in Abuja, Nigeria, with a stable of authors that includes Teju Cole and Helon Habila.
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Post by Shymmex on Jan 15, 2016 15:12:38 GMT
Tope Folarin Tope Folarin, (Oluwabusayo Temitope Folarin) is a Nigerian writer. He won the 2013 Caine Prize. In April 2014 he was named in the Hay Festival's Africa39 project as one of the 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with the potential and the talent to define the trends of the region. LifeFolarin was born in Ogden, Utah. He grew up in Grand Prairie, Texas. He graduated from Morehouse College in 2004, with a B.A., and from the University of Oxford in 2006, with an M.Sc. He was a Rhodes Scholar. He is on the board of the Hurston/Wright Foundation. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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Post by Shymmex on Jan 15, 2016 15:24:03 GMT
Bayo Ojikutu
 Bayo Ojikutu (born 1971) is a United States-based novelist and creative writer of Nigerian heritage. His first novel, 47th Street Black (Random House/Crown, 2003), received both the Washington Prize for Fiction and the Great American Book Award. Ojikutu's short fiction has appeared widely, including within the pages of the 2013 Akashic Press collection USA Noir and in William Morrow's speculative fiction anthology Shadow Show. Ojikutu's short story, "Yayi and Those Who Walk on Water: A Fable", received a nomination from the Pushcart Prize for outstanding fiction published in small literary presses in 2009. By then, Three Rivers Press had released his second novel, Free Burning, to considerable critical acclaim. Ojikutu has taught creative writing at various U.S. academic institutions.
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Post by osoronga on Feb 7, 2016 8:14:43 GMT
Great list, there's also Lola Shoneyin ( Wole Soyinka daughter in law) , Omolara Wood. Does Sefi Atta count as Yoruba? She's Igbirra married to Gboyega Kuti
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