Yewande Omotoso

Yewande Omotoso is an award-winning African author and short stories writer. Her debut novel Bomboy (2011), won the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize.

Yewande Omotoso was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria with her Nigerian father, West Indian mother, and two older brothers. She and her family moved to South Africa in 1992 and have lived there ever since. Yewande Omotoso trained as an architect and holds a master's in creative writing from the University of Cape Town.

Omotoso's debut novel, Bom Boy, about a troubled young man living in the suburbs of Cape Town, was published in 2011 by Modjaji Books in Cape Town. Yewande was shortlisted for the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature and was a 2015 Miles Morland Scholar.

Her second novel, The Woman Next Door (2016), was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Literature Prize. It also was a finalist in the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction and has been translated into Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Korean.

Her third novel, An Unusual Grief, was published in November 2021.

Her short stories include How About The Children (Kalahari Review), Things Are Hard (2012 Caine Prize Anthology), Fish (The Moth Literary Journal), and The Leftovers (One World Two).

Yewande Omotoso currently lives in Cape Town.

Photo credit: www.yewandeomotoso.com