Author of Ogadinma and founder of Isele Magazine, Ukamaka Olisakwe, prefers to discuss the realities of motherhood, childbirth and wifehood: ‘Ogadinma is a composite of the women I know, and so I wanted the story to reflect the period and the communities truthfully, no matter how uncomfortable those truths are.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
I read every entertaining book I could lay my hands on, from John Grisham to Nora Roberts, Sydney Sheldon, James Hardley Chase, Danielle Steele, and even Frederick Forsyth, who my father loved. I also read romance books, everything I could find from the stables of Harlequin and Mills and Boons, whose covers we would tear off because of the explicit graphics and because I grew up in a deeply conservative community in Sabon Gari, Kano. Our parents had purist ideas about what a girl should do with her time and the kind of books she should read.
I didn’t particularly love literary novels, what’s supposedly considered high fiction, because I thought they were boring, their plots tedious. But over the years, after I moved to Aba to start a family and subsequently, found an interest in storytelling, my taste shifted, and I have since come to love the kind of books my secondary school teachers encouraged us to read.
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