Atinuke

Atinuke was born in Nigeria to a Nigerian university lecturer father and an English editor mother. From her About Me section of her website:

“For the first years of my life we lived in a dusty provincial town near my grandmother and grandfather, my uncles and my aunts, and the big boy cousins that I adore. Then my father was offered a government job and we moved to the enormous chaotic city of Lagos, where, despite the arrival of my two sisters, I was often lonely and bored. 

When I was ten I was sent to boarding school in England. This was something I wanted very much (due to reading far too much Enid Blyton). It did cure me of my loneliness and boredom but I suffered terribly from homesickness. 

Luckily it was only three years before my parents moved to England with my sisters and brand new baby brother and I was able to leave boarding school and embark on a new adventure with my siblings at the local comprehensive school. 

My father went back to Nigeria after only a year, drawn by a new government post and his own homesickness. We joined him in the school holidays but, for us, home became England. And, after a gap year in Paris, I went to the University of York in the north of England to study English and Commonwealth Literatures.

After university I went back to France and fell in love with living on the land, but it was in England that I told my first story on stage, spontaneously at a festival, when the booked performer did not turn up. I absolutely loved it, and better still, the audience absolutely loved it!  

For the next few years I fell head over heels into storytelling. I started collecting stories and performing them all over the world, at festivals and in schools, focussing on stories from Africa and the African diaspora. I still tell stories now whenever I am invited to do author events at schools or literary festivals. 

In 2005 an illness stopped me from travelling long enough to write the first “Anna Hibiscus” stories. 

I had been meaning to write those stories for years – ever since the homesickness of my boarding school days when I discovered how little children in the UK knew about Africa and even more so as a story teller when it was clear from children’s questions how little they still knew about the Africa that I am from. 

“Anna Hibiscus” was quickly followed by “The No.1 Car Spotter” which I wrote for (and with) my own sons. Because among all the stories and the traveling and the books, I had two sons, and moved to Wales (not in that order). 

We live in a house I built (with my hands) on a rocky, boggy mountainside overlooking the sea. I am still collecting and telling stories but now in the most excellent of company. I write book after book and the boys patiently listen to draft after draft.

Often the rain stops and the sun comes out and the sea and sky are blue and I am as near to paradise as I have ever hoped to be.”