Yewande Omotoso

Yewande Omotoso was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria. As a young girl she moved with her family and has since lived in South Africa – Cape Town and Johannesburg. Yewande trained as an architect at the University of Cape Town and completed an MA in Creative Writing from the same university. Her novels are Bom Boy (2011, Modjaji Books), which won the SA Literary Award First Time Author Prize; The Woman Next Door (2016, Chatto and Windus), shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Literature Prize; and An Unusual Grief (2022, Cassava Republic). Her short stories include How About The Children (Kalahari Review) and Things Are Hard (2012 Caine Prize Anthology).

Omotoso, for whom writing is a means to make sense of the world, is particularly interested in the complexity of human experiences and emotions as well as the incongruities of life. Inspired by Arundhati Roy, herself a student of Architecture, Omotoso views writing as her Architectural practice – fiction as another form of contemplating and regarding ourselves in and around spaces and places. Omotoso teaches occasional Creative Writing workshops and works as a Storytelling Advisor for Greenpeace International.