Ayobami Adebayo

Having children does become tied to a sense of identity and our value as humans. ”

When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. ”

I don't suffer from SCD myself, but I do carry the gene. This means that if I married another person who carried the gene, there would be a danger our children would suffer from the disease. ”

I wanted to write about extended family systems. You have people you can fall back on, and it's good. But what if you don't fit into what is expected of you? ”

I'm still very interested in the things that happened in the '80s and the '70s because I think that they were very important years for Nigeria. In the '80s, we were under a military dictatorship for quite a while, and I think that the way we engage with our country as citizens was shaped in many ways by the events that took place in that time. ”

My mother used to laugh that if they asked me to clean up my room, I would spend so much time reading every tiny bit of paper, a receipt or whatever, instead of throwing it in the trash. ”

I wander around online, but until I hit my daily word count, I only leave my desk to make some tea, eat, or to answer the door. At 7 P.M., I give up and spend the rest of the evening catching up with the news. ”

Wole Soyinka's 'Death and the King's Horseman' is a play I go back to and I read often. ”

When I was in my late teens, a couple of friends passed away suddenly. This was quite distressing, but after a while, as tends to happen when one is once or twice removed from grief, I stopped thinking about them all the time. ”