Molara Wood

**Molara Wood** (born 1967) is a Nigerian creative writer, journalist and critic. Currently lives in Lagos and writes an Arts column for _The Guardian_. She is also a blogger.

## Early life

She was born in 1967 in Nigeria. Her life, as she described, was "a fairly peripatetic life". In a 2015 interview with Oyebade Dosunmu for _Aké Review_, Wood said: "Even long before my UK days I had lived in Northern and South-Western Nigeria as well as Los Angeles— all by the age of eleven or twelve. There is a sense in which you’re always out of time, out of place—and the years in Britain merely compounded that. The feeling doesn’t go away with return to Nigeria, it merely mutates, as people remark about me coming across as someone from ‘away’, even when I’m trying to blend in. I am therefore pretty sensitive to the permutations of dislocation and re-integration. London was a huge tableau for me to observe this theatre of human experience as far as Nigerian immigrants were concerned."

## Career

She was described as "one of the eminent voices in the Arts in Nigeria".

She writes short stories, flash fiction, poetry and essays. Her works were published in a media such as  _African Literature Today_, _Chimurenga_, _Farafina Magazine_, _Sentinel Poetry_, _DrumVoices Revue_, _Sable LitMag_, _Eclectica Magazine_, _The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories_ (ed. Adewale Maja-Pearce, 2007), and _One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories_ (ed. Chris Brazier; New Internationalist, 2009).

In 2007 her fiction was highly commended in the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association's Short Story Competition.

In 2008 she won the inaugural John La Rose Memorial Short Story Competition.

Her collection of short stories, _Indigo_, was published in 2013 by Parrésia Publishers. _Indigo_ was well received, with _Critical Literature Review_ calling it "a reader's pleasure".

As Oyebade Dosunmu writes: "Wood tells stories of people who inhabit in between ‘indigo’ spaces: the borderland of immigration, the no-man's-land of multiculturalism and the frontiers of social mobility. These worlds spiral into one another and their inhabitants spin along, negotiating extremes of human circumstance—barrenness, the (fated) pursuit of glamour, madness, death—struggling, all the while, to plant roots in shifting sand." Many of the stories dealt with the lives of African women negotiating concerns such as barrenness, polygamy and widowhood. Wood has said that "these are the writings of a womanist and a feminist. I have a great empathy, a well of feeling for what women go through. I don’t feel these are given adequate treatment in the writings of male writers, so it’s really up to us, the female writers, to privilege the voices and experiences of women."

Wood was a judge for the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature. She is on the Advisory Board of the Aké Arts and Book Festival. She also wa a participant in many literary eventsm such as the Lagos Book & Art Festival.

## Infobox (person)

- **name**: Molara Wood
- **alt**: Molara Wood in January 2020 on the Ake Festival
- **caption**: Molara Wood in January 2020 on the Ake Festival
- **birth name**: Molara Wood
- **birth place**: Nigeria
- **citizenship**: Nigerian
- **occupation**: Creative writer, journalist and critic