Segun Afolabi

Segun Afolabi (born 1966) is a Nigerian novelist and short story writer born in Kaduna, Nigeria.He is the son of a career diplomat. With his family, he moved frequently throughout his childhood, from country to country in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Several critics have remarked on this experience as an obvious influence on his writing.Afolabi won the 2005 Caine Prize for the story "Monday Morning", first published in Wasafiri, issue 41, spring 2004. His first novel, Goodbye Lucille, was published in April 2007 and won the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award. He was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2015.

Quotes

• Curiosity, a desire to tell stories, a love of psychology, trying to understanding human behaviour – all sorts of reasons.

• Necessarily slow. A journey of discovery – of writers who helped expand my view of the world.

• A sentence that popped into my head one chilly winter evening in London: ‘“I want to piss,” the boy said…’ I had no idea who this boy was or what the story would be about, but often that’s the joy of writing – discovering a story as the words surface onto the page.

• I’ve published two books, a collection of short stories (‘A Life Elsewhere’) and a novel (‘Goodbye Lucille’), which won the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award. I’m working on a new novel and more stories, but as I’m a part-time writer everything happens very, very slowly.

• I don’t keep score, but the revision process seems, necessarily, endless, which used to bother me, but I now realise it all adds to the creative process.

• I tend to think of rejection as an opportunity to examine the writing, refine it to another degree – another stage in the editing/revising process. But, honestly, rejection never gets any easier.

• This list changes according to time of day, week, month, year etc., so it’s rendered almost meaningless: Graham Greene, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Jamaica Kincaid and J.M. Coetzee

• I used to read anything: horror, science fiction, comics etc. I rarely read anything apart from literary fiction now (and non-fiction), since there’s so little time to devote to anything else, although a colleague recently recommended ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’.

• My father was a diplomat so we had to move every three years or so, sometimes after only less than a year. In a way I got my travelling done at a very young age and tended to, and still do, view the world in terms of similarities between people rather than differences.

• I can't add up the years I've lived in Nigeria as it's too complicated, but soon after I was born (I must have been around one) we moved to the Congo, then back to Lagos, then to Canada, then back to Nigeria for two to three years.

• Writers I admire include: James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, JM Coetzee, Maya Angelou, John Fowles, Percival Everett, Graham Greene, VS Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Caryl Phillips... the list could go on and on.