Molara Wood

Last updated
Molara Wood
Born
Molara Wood

1967 (age 56–57)
Nigeria
Occupation(s)Creative writer, journalist and critic

Molara Wood (born 1967) [1] is a Nigerian creative writer, journalist and critic. She has been described as "one of the eminent voices in the Arts in Nigeria". [2] Her short stories, flash fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in numerous publications. These include African Literature Today , Chimurenga , Farafina Magazine , Sentinel Poetry, DrumVoices Revue, Sable LitMag, Eclectica Magazine , The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories (ed. Adewale Maja-Pearce, 2007), and One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories (ed. Chris Brazier; New Internationalist, 2009). [1] [2] She currently lives in Lagos. [3]

Contents

Background

Born in Nigeria, Molara Wood has lived what she describes as "a fairly peripatetic life", encompassing two decades in Britain, where she had initially gone to study ("Three or four years max, was the plan. But life happens. You don’t see the years rolling into each other, then you wake up one day, and you’ve been in England for 20 years"). [4] In a 2015 interview with Oyebade Dosunmu for Aké Review, Wood elaborated: "Even long before my UK days, I had lived in Northern and South-Western Nigeria as well as Los Angeles—all by the age of eleven or twelve. There is a sense in which you're always out of time, out of place—and the years in Britain merely compounded that. The feeling doesn’t go away with return to Nigeria, it merely mutates, as people remark about me coming across as someone from ‘away’, even when I’m trying to blend in. I am therefore pretty sensitive to the permutations of dislocation and re-integration. London was a huge tableau for me to observe this theatre of human experience as far as Nigerian immigrants were concerned." [2]

In 2007, her fiction was highly commended in the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association's Short Story Competition. [5] In 2008 she won the inaugural John La Rose Memorial Short Story Competition. [6] Since returning to Nigeria, she has been Arts and Culture Editor of Next newspaper (which ceased publication in 2011), and currently writes an Arts column for The Guardian in Lagos, where she is now based. [7] During her time at Next, she was the editor for Teju Cole´s Letters to a young Writer series. [8] She is also a blogger. [3]

Her collection of short stories, Indigo, was published in 2013 by Parrésia Publishers. [9] Indigo was well received, with Critical Literature Review calling it "a reader's pleasure". [10] As Oyebade Dosunmu writes: "Wood tells stories of people who inhabit in between ‘indigo’ spaces: the borderland of immigration, the no-man's-land of multiculturalism and the frontiers of social mobility. These worlds spiral into one another and their inhabitants spin along, negotiating extremes of human circumstance—barrenness, the (fated) pursuit of glamour, madness, death—struggling, all the while, to plant roots in shifting sand." [2] Many of the stories dealt with the lives of African women negotiating concerns such as barrenness, polygamy and widowhood. Wood has said that "these are the writings of a womanist and a feminist. I have a great empathy, a well of feeling for what women go through. I don’t feel these are given adequate treatment in the writings of male writers, so it's really up to us, the female writers, to privilege the voices and experiences of women." [2]

Wood was a judge for the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature. [11] She is on the Advisory Board of the Aké Arts and Book Festival and has been a participant in many literary events, including the Lagos Book & Art Festival. [12]

In 2022, she was appointed a writer-in-residence by the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD), based in Accra, Ghana. [13]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helon Habila</span> Nigerian novelist and poet (born 1967)

Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.

Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, also known as Molara Ogundipe, was a Nigerian poet, critic, editor, feminist and activist. Considered one of the foremost writers on African feminism, gender studies and literary theory, she was a social critic who came to be recognized as a viable authority on African women among black feminists and feminists in general. She contributed the piece "Not Spinning on the Axis of Maleness" to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan. She is most celebrated for coining the term STIWA or Social Transformation in Africa Including Women.

Sarah Ladipo Manyika FRSL is a British-Nigerian writer of novels, short stories and essays and an active member of the literary community, particularly supporting and amplifying young writers and female voices. She is the author of two well-received novels, In Dependence (2009) and Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun (2016), as well as the non-fiction collection Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora (2022), and her writing has appeared in publications including Granta, Transition, Guernica, and OZY, and previously served as founding Books Editor of OZY. Manyika's work also features in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lola Shoneyin</span> Nigerian poet and author (born 1974)

Lola Shoneyin is a Nigerian poet and author who launched her debut novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, in the UK in May 2010. Shoneyin has forged a reputation as an adventurous, humorous and outspoken poet, having published three volumes of poetry. Her writing delves into themes related to female sexuality and the difficulties of domestic life in Africa. In April 2014 she was named on the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature. Lola won the PEN Award in America as well as the Ken Saro-Wiwa Award for prose in Nigeria. She was also on the list for the Orange Prize in the UK for her debut novel, The Secret of Baba Segi's Wives, in 2010. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria, where she runs the annual Aké Arts and Book Festival. In 2017, she was named African Literary Person of the Year by Brittle Paper.

Sade Adeniran is a Nigerian novelist whose debut novel, Imagine This, won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in Africa. Imagine This was originally self-published by the author. Based in London, she is also a filmmaker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">9mobile Prize for Literature</span> Award

The 9mobile Prize for Literature was created by Etisalat Nigeria in 2013, and is the first ever pan-African prize celebrating first-time African writers of published fiction books. Awarded annually, the prize aims to serve as a platform for the discovery of new creative talent out of the continent and invariably promote the burgeoning publishing industry in Africa. The winner receives a cash prize of £15,000 in addition to a fellowship at the University of East Anglia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ellah Wakatama Allfrey</span> Zimbabwean editor and literary critic (born 1966)

Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL, is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was the senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and an assistant editor at Penguin. She is the series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinelo Okparanta</span> Nigerian-American writer

Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi</span> Ugandan novelist and short story writer

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan-British novelist and short story writer. Her doctoral novel, The Kintu Saga, was shortlisted and won the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013. It was published by Kwani Trust in 2014 under the title Kintu. Her short story collection, Manchester Happened, was published in 2019. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story "Let's Tell This Story Properly", and emerged Regional Winner, Africa region. She was the Overall Winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She was longlisted for the 2014 Etisalat Prize for Literature. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. In 2018, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in the fiction category. In 2021, her novel The First Woman won the Jhalak Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harriet Anena</span> Ugandan writer and performer

Ber Anena born and previously published as Harriet Anena is a Ugandan writer and performer, whose writing includes poetry, nonfiction and fiction. She is the author of a collection of poems, A Nation In Labour, published in 2015, won the 2018 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. The Economist described her poetry performance as "an arresting evocation of love and war".

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a Nigerian linguist, writer, translator, scholar, and cultural activist. His work and influence span the fields of education, language technology, literature, journalism, and linguistics. He is the recipient of the 2016 Premio Ostana "Special Prize" for Writings in the Mother Tongue for his work in language advocacy. He writes in Yoruba and English, and is currently the Africa editor of the Best Literary Translations anthology, published by Deep Vellum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aké Arts and Book Festival</span> Annual literary event in Nigeria

The Aké Arts and Book Festival is a literary and artistic event held annually in Nigeria. It was founded in 2013 by Lola Shoneyin, a Nigerian writer and poet, in Abeokuta. It features new and established writers from across the world, and its primary focus has been to promote, develop, and celebrate the creativity of African writers, poets, and artists. The Aké Arts and Book Festival has been described as the African continent's biggest annual gathering of literary writers, editors, critics, and readers. The festival has an official website and a dedicated magazine, known as the Aké Review.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Ali</span> Nigerian publisher

Richard Ali is a Nigerian writer, lawyer and co-founder of Parrésia Publishers, a Lagos-based Afri-centric publishing house, home to Helon Habila, Onyeka Nwelue, Chika Unigwe and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, other continental voices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chibundu Onuzo</span> Nigerian novelist (born 1991)

Imachibundu Oluwadara Onuzo is a Nigerian novelist. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.

Yewande Omotoso is a South African-based novelist, architect and designer, who was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria. She currently lives in Johannesburg. Her two published novels have earned her considerable attention, including winning the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author, being shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the M-Net Literary Awards 2012, and the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature, and being longlisted for the 2017 Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction. She is the daughter of Nigerian writer Kole Omotoso, and the sister of filmmaker Akin Omotoso.

Adewale Maja-Pearce is an Anglo-Nigerian writer, journalist and literary critic, who is best known for his documentary essays. He is the author of several books, including the memoirs In My Father's Country (1987) and The House My Father Built (2014), several other non-fiction titles and a collection of short stories entitled Loyalties and Other Stories (1986).

Natalia Molebatsi is a South African writer, poet, performer, editor, and cultural organizer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dami Ajayi</span> Nigerian writer, poet, and medical doctor

Dami Ajayi is a Nigerian writer, poet and medical doctor who co-founded Saraba, a Nigerian literary magazine in 2008.

Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo is a Nigerian author and educator, whose published work includes novels, poetry, short stories, books for children, essays and journalism. She is the winner of several awards in Nigeria, including the Nigeria Prize for Literature.

Karen Jennings is a South African author.

References

  1. 1 2 "Reviews Editor", Editorial Board, Sentinel Poetry Quarterly.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Oyebade Dosunmu, "Peripatetic Lives: An Interview with Molara Wood, Author of Indigo" (interview), Aké Review, 30 November 2015.
  3. 1 2 Wordsbody blog.
  4. ↑ Miriam N. Kotzin, "Molara Wood, The Per Contra Interview", Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas.
  5. ↑ Commonwealth Broadcasting Press Association (20 November 2007). "Zambian Woman Wins Commonwealth Short Story Comp | Scoop News". www.scoop.co.nz. Retrieved 13 February 2020.
  6. ↑ "The John La Rose Memorial Short Story Competition", Wordsbody, 17 March 2008.
  7. ↑ Molara Wood profile at The Guardian (Nigeria).
  8. ↑ "words follow me". words follow me. 27 October 2010. Retrieved 23 September 2021.
  9. ↑ Anote Ajeluorou, "Molara Wood kicks off CORA Book Trek 2016 with reading from Indigo, Route 234", The Guardian (Nigeria), 17 July 2016.
  10. ↑ Joseph Omotayo, "Indigo by Molara Wood" (review), Critical Literature Review, 31 December 2013.
  11. ↑ Judges, Etisalat Prize for Literature.
  12. ↑ "Molara Wood Reads from 'Indigo', Other Works, At Quintessence", CORA 2016 Events, 5 July 2016.
  13. ↑ "Library of Africa and African Diaspora Announces West African Writer Fellowship Residents". Nigeria Abroad. 25 February 2022. Retrieved 30 December 2023.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.