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Ani Kayode Somtochukwu Quotes

1999–2000 Nigeria

Ani Kayode Somtochukwu (born 1999 or 2000) is a Nigerian novelist, known for his 2023 debut novel, And Then He Sang a Lullaby, which won the Edmund White Award in 2024.

Nigeria
Activists
Novelists

Random Ani Kayode Somtochukwu quote

6 quotes

Queer liberation is the only sustainable solution.

My queer activism in university came with a steeper cost than I had stopped to take account of. I was mocked openly, mobbed twice by cultists and threatened too many times to count.

One feedback that I enjoyed though found surprising was that And Then He Sang a Lullaby was so Nigerian. So 'unapologetically Nigerian' one reviewer put it. That is the biggest compliment I could get.

I like to think of my writing as an expression of love for the African people, a commitment to our capacity for justice and liberty, an insistence on dreaming our freedom as an inevitable eventuality. I want to be an incendiary bomb. And I know that stories have that power.

I wrote And Then He Sang a Lullaby while doing an internship. I was working for a hospital in Port Harcourt as a laboratory assistant.

By the time I started working on And Then He Sang a Lullaby in August 2018, I had already been a queer activist for about three years and had suffered a lot of repercussions for it.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Ani Kayode Somtochukwu (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.