Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Stubs/Yewande Omotoso

Yewande Omotose - was born in Barbados in 1980 and grew up in Nigeria with her Barbadian mother, Nigerian father and two older brothers. The family moved to South Africa in 1992.

Education
Yewande studied Architecture at the University of Cape Town, worked as an architect for several years and went on to complete a Masters degree in Creative Writing.

Employment
She is currently based in Johannesburg where she works as an architect, freelance writer and novelist. Her debut novel, Bom Boy (2011) was shortlisted for the 2012 South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize as well as the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature.

She draws her inspiration from a wide range of writers and artists. Arundhati Roy (also an Architect) is key among them. That Yewande could study one thing and become another felt more palpable with Roy as an example. Writers like Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath, Zora Neale Hurston, Diane Evans and Andrea Levy for their courage as writers and the amazing appeal of their unique ways of cultivating words into sentences and paragraphs.

Yewande’s writing is a way of looking; at people, emotions and experiences, particularly those we might be more compelled to hide. She writes about displacement; the kind experienced by immigrants in a foreign land as well as that sensed by those who sometimes feel alien in their human bodies or strange in the prevalent status-quo of whatever society and culture they find themselves in.

Bom Boy
Bom Boy - is Pidgin English for baby boy. The story is about Leke. He is a troubled young man living in the suburbs of Cape Town. He develops strange habits of stalking people, stealing small objects and going from doctor to doctor in search of companionship rather than cure. Through a series of letters written to him by his Nigerian father (Oscar) whom he has never met, Leke learns about a family curse; a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. Bom Boy is a well-crafted, and complex narrative written with a sensitive understanding.