Writing the city’s shadows: a conversation with Lola Akande

This interview with Dr. Lola Akande, a novelist, scholar, and faculty member in the Department of English, University of Lagos, Nigeria, examines the intersections of creative writing, academic practice, and social critique in her work. Done through structured email conversation, the interview explores Akande’s motivations, craft choices, and intellectual commitments as reflected across her novels In Our Place (2012), What It Takes (2016), Where Are You From? (2018), Suitors Are Scarce in Lagos (2020), and The Truth about Sadia (2023), as well as her monograph The City in the African Novel (2019). It gave special attention to her award-winning novel, What It Takes, a pointed fictional exposé of systemic abuse, bureaucratic impunity, and the problems confronting postgraduate students in Nigerian universities that (2017 Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Prize for Prose Fiction). Akande reflects on the responsibilities of writers working within institutional contexts and frames her fiction as social interventionfeminist critique, and narrative reclamation. The interview, an inquiry into how literature articulates resistance within the university and the city, underscores the interviewer’s place as a scholar engaged with African women’s writing and gendered power relations. Overall, the interview offers insight into Akande’s literary vision and the socio-cultural urgencies shaping her storytelling.