"Going to Hedgebrook was a transformative experience for me. I was already a published author before I went, but the experience of going to Hedgebrook and meeting other writers made me believe in myself as a writer and trust in my own voice more than I’d ever dared to before. I’ve always tried to support fellow writers and Hedgebrook has given me an even wider platform from which to do so."
Sarah Ladipo Manyika FRSL is a British-Nigerian writer. She is the author of In Dependence (2009) and Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun (2016). Her articles have appeared in publications including Granta, Transition, Guernica, and OZY, which she served as founding books editor. Manyika's work also features in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa edited by Margaret Busby.
"Negritude is an ideology of the elite, completely devoid of meaning for the masses ... Negritude is an ideology suggesting that Africans are blessed with a soul and not reason. They would have us believe that Africans can sing, dance and feel, but not think."
"The future of Nigeria is no longer in its army as some of us used to think, but in the oil business."
"What is done is done and I’ll wait until I get home to see how bad things really are. Consider the birds in the sky, I remind myself. Consider the birds in the sky."
"How could I explain that the way he craved my body made me angry."
"Thanks to my mum, I read many Puffin classics. I loved the miniature Beatrix Potter books, Richard Adam’s Watership Down, and tales of Brer Rabbit. As a child, I was a voracious reader, of books and of people, and still am an inveterate eavesdropper and people-watcher. Snippets of overheard conversations and the faces of people not usually noticed often inspire the stories I write. Wondering about other people’s life stories is what I do."
"A book reads us as much as we read a book."