Irenosen Okojie

Irenosen Okojie is a writer and Arts Project Manager. Her debut novel Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask award. Her work has been featured in The Observer, The Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. Her short stories have been published internationally.

Having been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for her novels All the Blood Is Red and Orange Laughter, critically acclaimed author and lecturer Leone Ross returns with Come Let Us Sing Anyway, a raucous, vibrant collection of short stories that rattles along, genre hopping with chameleon-like gusto.

In the next essay in our Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches series, author Irenosen Okojie writes about the initiative that Africans are showing as they fight for community health and survival during the climate crisis. With activists of colour often overlooked in mainstream media, Okojie links her longing for home with an admiration and fierce pride at the innovation of African artists and entrepreneurs working for a better future. Read more Global Dispatches – including Swati Arora on protest, Robbie Arnott on climate, and Margarita García Robayo on Covid-19 and racism – here.

Novelist Irenosen Okojie writes a tribute to her former mentor and ‘literary titan’ Alex Wheatle, who passed away recently on 16 March, 2025. Known as the ‘Brixton Bard’, Wheatle was the author of several books set in South London, and was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2008.