Sefi Atta, award winning author of Everything Good Will Come and recently announced Caine Prize judge will be guest today at Quintessence in an evening event planned to celebrate her 55th birthday.
The event will feature readings and a Q&A between the writer and her audience.
Ms Atta has just published a novel, The Bead Collector. It is a historical novel set in the Ikoyi of 1976 during the Dimka coup which claimed the life of Head of State General Murtala Muhammad.
In a recent interview with Toni Kan, Sefi Atta whose stories are usually about class, family dysfunction and Ikoyi spoke about her fixation with those themes as well as with Lagos and Ikoyi.
“You know, I’ve also been called a Lagos writer and a feminist writer, but I just tell stories that interest me in ways that interest me. Growing up in Ikoyi, I had friends who used drugs. Friends who discovered their fathers had girlfriends, second wives and other children. Friends whose mothers were victims of physical and emotional abuse. Friends whose parents got divorced. I never thought any of those families were dysfunctional. To me, such things were just part of family life. But I always heard about them from third parties because appearance was everything in Ikoyi, most especially the appearance of respectability.”
Continuing she said “When I was a child, I was called oniranu a lot at home because I poked fun at people I ought to respect. I was about six years old when I made up a song about a certain Lagos society woman. One line, I remember, said she had rashes, even though she didn’t. I’m still an oniranu at heart. I never grew out of it. In my play Lengths to Which We Go, which you’ve read, I have an aspiring character called Mrs. Babalola who calls herself upper “clarse”. In my short story “Unsuitable Ties”, I have a snobbish character called Biola whom I refer to as an authority on class since her early schooling in Switzerland. Characters like these provide comic relief for me.”
The event runs from 3 to 5pm today Saturday 19:1:19 at Quintessence Parkview Ikoyi.
Source: This Is Lagos