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.Wordsbody blog. She is also a blogger.Wordsbody blog. 

 Early life 
She was born in 1967 in Nigeria."Reviews Editor" , Editorial Board, Sentinel Poetry Quarterly. Her life, as she described, was "a fairly peripatetic life".Miriam N. Kotzin, "Molara Wood, The Per Contra Interview", Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas. 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."Oyebade Dosunmu, "Peripatetic Lives: An Interview with Molara Wood, Author of Indigo"  (interview), Aké Review, 30 November 2015.

 Career 
She was described as "one of the eminent voices in the Arts in Nigeria".Oyebade Dosunmu, "Peripatetic Lives: An Interview with Molara Wood, Author of Indigo"  (interview), Aké Review, 30 November 2015.

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)."Reviews Editor" , Editorial Board, Sentinel Poetry Quarterly.Oyebade Dosunmu, "Peripatetic Lives: An Interview with Molara Wood, Author of Indigo"  (interview), Aké Review, 30 November 2015.

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."The John La Rose Memorial Short Story Competition", Wordsbody, 17 March 2008.

Her collection of short stories, Indigo, was published in 2013 by Parrésia Publishers.Anote Ajeluorou, "Molara Wood kicks off CORA Book Trek 2016 with reading from Indigo, Route 234" , The Guardian (Nigeria), 17 July 2016. Indigo was well received, with Critical Literature Review calling it "a reader's pleasure".Joseph Omotayo, "Indigo by Molara Wood" (review), 31 December 2013.

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."Oyebade Dosunmu, "Peripatetic Lives: An Interview with Molara Wood, Author of Indigo"  (interview), Aké Review, 30 November 2015. 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.Judges , 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."Molara Wood Reads from 'Indigo', Other Works, At Quintessence" , CORA 2016 Events, 5 July 2016.       

 References 

Category:1967 births
Category:Living people
Category:Nigerian writers