Feature Ayóbámi Adébáyò


Aſter studying under a stellar cast of author-tutors, Ayóbámi Adébáyò’s first novel was published to great acclaim. Natasha Onwuemezi meets the author ahead of her book fair bow


Staying Power


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IGERIAN AUTHOR AYÓBÁMI Adébáyò’s first novel, Stay with Me (Canongate), is a culmination of years of writing experience—including numer- ous workshops and two Masters degrees—and mentor- ships from behemoths of literature Margaret Atwood and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In 2007, Adébáyò was accepted onto a 10-day work- shop with Adichie, which proved to be a formative expe- rience for the young writer. “It was at that point, aged 19, that I was making a decision that [writing] was what I wanted to spend my life doing and [the workshop] was good to experience,” she says. More recently, Adébáyò worked with Atwood while


studying Creative Writing at the Universit of East Anglia, and recalls being “so impressed with her”, espe- cially with the fact that Atwood has “read absolutely everything”. Adébáyò says: “That might be one of the most important things I took away from that class. I’ve always loved to read, but it just showed me that people who work at that level are really voracious readers. I didn’t know how that was possible.” Atwood worked with Adébáyò on the first chapter of what became Stay with Me, a devastating début about how the pressures of motherhood, masculinit and marriage slowly undo a relationship. The multiple threads that run through the novel—the intricacies of Yoruba culture, the turbulence of Nigerian politics and the painful realities of sickle cell disease—make for a rich, textured work that explores the fragilit of married love against the back- ground of a country rife with instabilit.


Spanning decades


Oscillating between 1985 and 2008, the novel follows Yejide and Akin, a couple who meet while the former is at universit—and quickly marry. They are slowly pulled apart by the pressure of childlessness and then, when they finally manage to conceive, by the secrets they keep from each other and the grief


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