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Olatunbosun Taofeek
Olatunbosun Taofeek, PhD, is a Nigerian writer with a philosophical and liberal outlook— accepting diverse human enlightenment, believing more in creativity and an interdisciplinary approach towards problem-solving. He was a philosopher-apprentice under the legendary Professor Sophie Oluwole. He describes himself as belonging to the “Sango School”, a group of intellectuals and writers seeking to re-imagine indigenous African views in their works.

However, he is more of a liberal and hybridist in writing and worldview. “Life has no working manual, so we should not preach morals or vices but preach life as writers,” he has been quoted to say. He writes plays, novels, poetry, essays, biographies and political papers. He has won awards in public speaking and writing. He has also been a member of literary boards, publishing houses and organizations.

He speaks English, Yoruba, Hausa, Pidgin and French owing to his exposure to different cultures within Nigeria, given the nature of his father’s occupation. He is currently a university lecturer who doubles as a principal researcher with Grecian Limited, a research company he founded in 2018 as a private researcher. 

Biography
Taofeek was born in Lagos into a Yoruba family. His father, Oladele Olatunbosun Shamsideen, retired from the military having served as an infantry soldier in the Nigerian Army for 38 years.

Oladele participated in several foreign peace missions including Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as in local peacekeeping operations. Oladele was one of the last set of soldiers to be deployed for Nigeria’s civil war that ended in 1970. Oladele was married to Iyabo Olatunbosun (nee Oguntuase) and Aminat subsequently.

In the early 90s, Taofeek lived in several parts of Nigeria as his father moved with his family from one military formation to another before finally settling in Lagos in the 2000s. He attended Command Children’s School and moved to Nigerian Military School where he eventually left for Lagos to complete his secondary school.

It had been expected in the family that Taofeek would join the military, but the young man chose to be a writer instead. His oldest brother, Olatunbosun Olayinka, had decided to take up the mantle and risen to the rank of Major in the Nigerian Army before dying in Maiduguri while confronting Boko Haram fighters after returning from Bangladesh.

Taofeek wasn’t a smart kid ab initio; it took him three years to speak as a child and he always came last in most of his earliest classes. Rather humorously, he recalls how he used to have to serve his kid sister Taiye by helping to bring home her many prizes as a serial award winner. With constant home tutorials, however, Taofeek managed to improve and eventually started topping his classes in primary school. He achieved the same feat in secondary school, graduating a year ahead of his set since he made all his papers in the session before.

He proceeded to the Department of English, University of Lagos where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in English, a Master’s in English Literature and a Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature specialising in Literary Psycho-biography as advised and encouraged by Prof. William Tudd Schultz of the University of the Pacific and supervised by Professor Christopher Anyokwu of the University of Lagos.

Writing Career
From 2010, Taofeek started directing plays in his Alma mater’s Department of English, under the guidance of his teachers, Professor Hope Eghaga and Professor Bose Afolayan. For five years, he produced and presented “The Writers World”, a radio programme dedicated to writing issues on 103.1 FM Lagos. In the course of the programme, he met and interviewed numerous writers, critics, publishers and other members of the literati, all of whom influenced his writing career.

In 2010 he had a stopover in northern Nigeria’s Radio Minna as a presenter. He served as a panelist in Lagos Book Festival in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2022. Subsequently, in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 he moderated and served as a host to Authors’ Groove in the Nigerian International Bookfair. In 2016 and 2017 he was appointed as a judge in Literary and Creative Writing Competition for Secondary Schools in Nigeria.

In terms of editorial commitments, he was the Editor-in-Chief for the Eagles’ Watch Magazine of Mountain Top University in 2017 and editor for the magazine of the national body of the Association of Nigerian Authors also in 2017. Taofeek also served as one of the editors of the Journal of Humanities, Management & Social Sciences (Vol.1 No.1, 2018). He became a Board Member representing Nigerian writers on the Nigerian Book Trust (2016-20230, the organisers of the Nigerian International Book Fair. He represented Nigerian authors on the National Council for Arts and Culture (2017) and was Cultural Ambassador, National Council for Arts & Culture in 2015.

He was a gold medallist in public speaking alongside Olaoluwa Oluwarinde in the Nigerian Tertiary Institutions Public Speaking and Debate Competition held in 2018 at the University of Ife. He was also a consultant to the National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools in Nigeria in 2021.

Other positions he has held include the following: Director, “The Trial of Covid-19”, a convocation play for Mountain Top University 2021; columnist, Daily Independent Newspaper (2022 till date); Assistant Editor for the PEN Nigerian projects: Of Shadows & Rainbows, 2022; Silver Lining: An Anthology of Nigerian Literature (Poems, Drama, Short Stories & Critical Essays), 2019 and PEN Africa Network, International Multilingual Anthology, 2023.

Area of Specialisation
Taofeek specialises in psycho-biographical criticism wherein the critic accounts for the symmetry known as literary psycho-biography of the connectivity between the created, the text and the creator, the author. This aspect is a study under Literature and Psychology as a form of investigation into Personality and Creativity.

He works on creative documents (novels, short stories, drama and poetry), biographies and other documentation forensically. He also engages in the business of interpreting personalities whether creative, simple or complex. Accordingly, he has worked on ethnographic materials in some African communities and museums. He writes creative pieces as a complete man of the theatre.

Playwrighting
As a dramatist, Taofeek has been greatly influenced by William Shakespeare from the English tradition and by Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi from the African perspective. His plays have a high philosophical thematic engagement ranging from cultural ambiguities to universal preoccupations of humans and their essence.Deep philosophising, actions and rich dialogues are the major attributes of his plays.

After serving as a Theatre Director in Theatre Practicum at the English Department, he wrote his first play, Mr Grammar, in an episodic series at the University of Lagos where the play got its first performance and simultaneously premiered on 8th April 2013 at the Annual Easter Cultural Festival tagged “Arise Africa”. The play was later published in 2015 by Book Station West Africa as a successful African writing project in the category of drama.

Later, he wrote the satirical comedy Merchants of Trouble, which depicts the influence of terrorism on the military architecture of Nigeria. The book sold more than twenty thousand pieces before its performance in 2018. In hind sight, the play foreshadows Taofeek’s brother’s death later in Maiduguri. The play was translated into French in 2021 for francophone readers.Today, the play is being studied across several universities and polytechnics in contrast to William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Taofeek later wrote the tragic play 1930: The Life and Times of Ayo Babalola published by University Press and performed as a convocation play of Mountain Top University in 2020. This play acted as a sequel to Femi Osofisan’s Ajayi Crowther in the continuum of missionary plays in Nigeria. Subsequently, he wrote a historical play on the Ilaro people entitled Oronna and His Amotekun. Focusing on the legendary Oronna, the play was simultaneously published by the Obafemi Awolowo University Press and Grecian Publishers. The play Where is Patient Zero? was premiered as “The Trial of Covid-19”, a convocation play for Mountain Top University that was later published in 2022. Taofeek’s latest plays are Oluronbi and Dear Mother (2023).