“Stay with Me”author Ayobami Adebayo is one writer to watch. Her first novel published by Quida Books in Nigeria, which recently won the 9mobile Literature Prize, has been on various shortlists across the globe. The novel was shortlisted for the Kwani Manuscript Project as work-in-progress in 2013. After it was published in 2017, it was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Wellcome Book Prize. It has also been longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. “Stay with Me” was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. In 2017, she won The Future Africa Award in the Arts and Culture category. Adebayo has worked as an editor for Saraba magazine since 2009. She shares her book story in this exclusive chat with EVELYN OSAGIE. Excerpts:
I am still getting used to it. Literary prizes are a form of acknowledgement that the work you put in is recognised and valued, and that means quite a lot. It is a pleasant surprise for many reasons. One of these is for this novel, “Stay with Me”, to have been selected for not just the long list, but to be shortlisted to have won a prize that gets probably hundreds of entries, is such a series of good events happening one after the other.
Although I think the importance of prizes to a writer is layered in itself. There are fantastic books that don’t win prizes and it does not make them any less good. It was a strong shortlist: the other books were also quite good. So, it is a pleasant surprise and a great honour that when the judges would make their final decision, they picked “Stay with Me”.
The recognition of a prize can be an encouragement. Most of the time that you are doing it, you don’t know if anybody will care about what you are doing or bother to read it and to have that kind of acknowledgement is encouraging. I remember while working on “Stay with Me” by 2013, I was thinking whether I knew what I was doing; and then it got longlisted and shorlisted for the manuscript prize. Then I thought to keep pushing.
Picks that come with winning
I think that the longlist in Nigeria has increased a measure of interest in the book. The book witnessed a similar pattern of interest when it was shortlisted for the the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction in the United Kingdom and the Wellcome Book Prize, and has been longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. So, that means that there were people who before that time had not heard of or read the book, but now are buying and reading it. For the 9mobile prize in Nigeria, since the long list came out, the book has remained in public view and it has been sustained in a certain way.
My book’s journey
It is a very long journey. I started thinking about the novel in 2008, but I didn’t feel I was ready to write it then. I was in my last year at university and have been writing short stories: quite a number of them have been published in anthologies, magazines, but I didn’t feel I had the skills to do something with the scope of the novel yet. So, I waited for two years and during the period, I would make notes. I kept a note where I wrote down ideas. I actually started writing the novel in 2010. From then, I kept working on it until 2015. It went through stages: the structure and point of view changed, I was basically experimenting. I tried different points of view. So, it took about five years to write. And when I was done writing it, I then pitched the novel to a number of agents and my current agent picked it up.
She (my agent) was the one that submitted it to the publishers. Canongate Publisher picked it up in the United Kingdom; Quida Books picked it up in Nigeria; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. picked it up in the United States and actually Kwani Books Manuscript Prize in Kenya. Kwani had already picked it up in 2013 because I had submitted it for its manuscript project. Although the brilliant Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi won, mine was shortlisted. And being on the shortlist meant you were then eligible to be published by Kwani when the novel was ready for publication. So, when it was ready for publication, Kwani finally published it in Kenya. And many other publishing houses across the world that read the book and liked it picked it up. It was a long journey.
My inspiration
One of the threads you have in the novel has to do with the sickle cell disease. It was something I was trying to deal with at the time when I began to think about the novel. I’ve had about two friends who had just passed on due to some complications from the disease after living with it all their lives. So, I began to think about what their lives and death were like for them and their families, who lost them so young. That was the spark of the novel. But the thing with a novel is that there are so many other things that come in and what you’d end up with may be far from what you were thinking about initially. That is why a substantial part of the book deals with grief and loss.
The novel is a story of a couple set in Ilesa. The novel, which begins in 1980 and comes forward to 2008 when it ends, is in some ways about Nigerian, politics of the 80s and its social-political reality and how it would impact on the couple’s personal life. It is written in such a way that you’d see the perspectives of the two people. They meet in Ife while the wife was studying at the then University of Ife. It is also about expectations that we have on marriages, and somehow about dealing with grief.
Childhood and my love for books
I think an important thing that made me the writer I am today was that I grew up around books. And so, I grew up reading books. Also, because my parents were readers, there were books everywhere in the house. And reading just became a part of our lives. And I remember by the time I became a teenager, I knew that if I wanted anything other than books, I’d have to explain why I needed it and make a case. But whenever I wanted to buy a book, I didn’t need to make any case, I’d get the money. That, I think, had a really great influence on me because I grew in a place where books were valued and where words on paper meant something. That configured my mind in such a way that I thought being a writer is something worth aspiring towards. It’s impossible to write my story without saying something about that fundamental fact that I grew up in a home where I was not only encouraged to read, my parents loved to read. I see them staying up to read books, so it wasn’t a strange thing when I became a bit obsessed with books.
Also, I grew up in Nigeria. My family is from Ilesha. My family lived in Lagos, Ilesha, Ile-Ife at the Obafemi Awolowo University. I studied in Obafemi Awolowo University. So, those are the places that I am very familiar with in Nigeria, and that I can reach for the texture easily. Growing up was fun. One of the highlights that could I remember, which fed into my creative pursuits was our visits to my grandmother’s. I would pester her to tell me stories because I was that child who wanted to sit down and listen to good stories. She would tell me stories about the animal kingdom and about Olurombi; and as a homage to her, I included two of the stories that she told me as a child in the novel. So, apart from the books that I was reading as a child, she, with her story-telling, was awakening my imagination in the ways she told me stories and the songs accompanying them.
Writers that inspired my passion
I have a lot of writers whose works mean a lot to me. I would start with Nigeria. I love Sefi Attah’s novels. I started reading Wole Soyinka as a teenager and his works have continued to really mean a lot to me. What Niyi Osundare does with language in his poetry is remarkable. And I think the books that we read as children are the ones that bring us into this world of wonder that you get in books. I remember some of those books that we read in primary school were the ones that helped us. There was one called “Koku Baboni” by Kolade Onadipe, “Sugar Girl” and “The Spider’s Land”. I may not remember those who wrote them, but I remember the stories. I remember “Without A Silver Spoon” back in Secondary School, I think the writer, Eddie Iroh worked at Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria at some point. I never forgot a scene about Garri in the book.
Although there are people that I read now that I’ve mentioned some of them, it is important that I have to acknowledge those that wrote for children that make them fall in love with books because that is where it starts. You read and are anxious to read more and keep loving books; from there you grow into an adult that cherishes books. There are so many American writers whose writings have greatly inspired my passion, like Toni Morrison, who just passed on; Elizabeth Strout, whose work I really admire; there is James Baldwin. There is Cheik Hamidou Kane published in the African Writers’ series in the 60s.
There is Senegalese writer Ousmane Sembene , whose novels and films have been very inspiring. But music is something else that really inspires me besides writing. And this is a major shout-out to our musicians. With this book, one of the musicians that really inspired me is Asa, especially her song she named Bamidele. I cannot count the number of times while I was working on the book that I listened to it because it just puts me in the right mood where I felt inspired to tell the story.