Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya is a young Nigerian writer and artist. An alumnus of Farafina and OkadaBooks Writers’ Bootcamp, he has been published in Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review, The Shallow Tales Review, Eunoia Review(forthcoming), Arts Lounge Magazine, Livina Press, Nollyrated, Aayo Literary Magazine, The Yellow House Library, Fiery Scribe Review and several more. First-place Winner of the 2022 intercontinental “The Green We Left Behind” French Embassy Climate Change Project Prize for Creative Nonfiction and a finalist for the 2018 Nigeria GTB Dusty Manuscript Prize for Full-length Fiction, he is a 2016 OAU House of Levites “The Ready Writers” Fellow.

Our chat with Ayosojumi cuts across writing and creativity.

“A good piece must have a central element: honesty. If you are writing honestly, the right words will come to you. A British writer once said the difference between bad writing and good writing is the appropriate words. If you are holding back, understating the whole thing, trying not to offend your readers, then you won’t hit the point. The point of writing is to make people feel something. If your writing fails to elicit a response from people, then I think the writing has failed…”

He shares some insight on his book, How To Catch a Story That Doesn’t Exist, and what it did for him.

“When I published it and people started reading, and I got the responses; there was this courage that it gave people out there. I realized that I shouldn’t have held back for so long. As a writer, it was ennobling. It made me feel important. Somebody out there needs and feeds on my writing. It gave me permission to continue to talk about things that I had once held myself back from. It ennobled and emancipated me.”

Click HERE to listen to the full interview.

You can find Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi and links to his works and interviews on @Ayomi_Osumare on Twitter.