The key is perseverance: improving yourself, your craft, and sending the works out over and over until someone says yes."

I can still recall unofficially attending some creative writing masters workshops with the legendary poet Lesego Rampolokeng at Rhodes. In one of these classes he described grandmothers as the original emcees, especially in moments of an intense verbal dressing down of the younger generation. 

We contain multitudes…

…to the ones who’ve only known about despair

I was hankering for an African legal thriller! Toni Morrison famously said, “If there’s a book you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I took her instruction to heart, but found out the hard way that writing a novel is no mean feat! There are many exciting African thrillers already out there, but none are legal thrillers with a heroine quite like Grace. 

It lingers, even when we try to chase it away… a profound and uncomfortable truth: pain, in its many forms, often fuels the most resonant art, I think. I believe this isn’t because writers revel in pain, but because pain, like joy, is universal. The exploration of pain in art is not a glorification of suffering; it is a reckoning with the human condition. Loss, grief, heartbreak—these are experiences that unearth truths we might otherwise ignore. And I must say something briefly: I don’t dream of unicorns feeding on rainbows; I dream of Ijele, Izaga, Adamma, ojuju calabar . . .

I will give anything to go back to that time I would write on the back of my Calculus II exercise book without caring for the ‘rules’. They say ignorance is bliss. I think ‘knowledge is torture’ or ‘knowledge is problems/chest pains’ should be published as the true opposite

I am a young poet. I am burdened by a lack of knowledge about the arts. However, this burden is not enough for me to surrender to being tossedto and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.

Once men are sold on an idea or value, it’s always difficult to make them change their ways.

I recently moved back home and started seeing my mother as a human being and was humbled to see how much I am like her. I thought I was better than her, because I have my father in me.

In the city, things are masked and played to the gallery a lot that it is difficult to easily find the real in the reel

I would like to show people as they really are. … people are such a rich collection of experiences and I hope to display their hopes and fears and dreams in my stories.

Creative writing is in the informal sector because qualifications are optional. Informality deprives writers of remuneration, security and benefits.