Ayobami Adebayo

I admire Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Strout, D. O. Fagunwa, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colm Toibin and Junot Diaz. It's a long list that keeps growing. ”

I wanted to explore expectations we have of people - what a woman should be, what a man should be. And if they don't meet our own interpretation of who they should be because of their gender, their background, their ethnic group, we then come to conclusions about them that are not accurate. ”

I'd always been interested in Nigeria's past. ”

In 2010, I was working in a bank in Lagos. It was a crazy job with long working hours. I had to leave for the office by 5:30 A.M., and sometimes I wouldn't be back until midnight. ”

Never lend people money you can't afford to give them as a gift. ”

I come from a part of Nigeria where a lot of value is placed on implicit communication. The 'well brought up' child is the one who can pick up nonverbal cues from adults and interpret them correctly. ”

Stay with Me' started out being very political, largely because I'm a little obsessed with politics. ”

I think a large part of being human centers on the state of being alone, and we try to mitigate that in so many ways. ”

I established my first writing routine when I was 13. The school year had just ended, and I'd won a stack of books for being the best student in a number of subjects. The pile included several 60-leaved notebooks that I decided to fill with short stories. ”

There is a strong view in Nigeria, as in many other cultures, that a marriage is not complete without children. I don't agree; I'm wary of the idea that people have to have some particular functionality in order to be full members of society. ”