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| "I know we have a lot of beautiful stories in Africa and we must find the African writers that will tell them beautifully" 'Seun Salami |
‘Seun Salami is the
author of ‘The Son of your Father’s Concubine’, a collection of short stories.
He also works as a full-time editor at a publishing firm in Lagos, Nigeria. In
this interview with Payme, ‘Seun talks about his first writing competition End the Story with which he is
encouraging young creative writers to complete one of his popular stories, ‘The Sex life of a Lagos
mad woman’ published on Ynaija.com where he also contributes
stories from time to time.
What
inspired your love for writing?
Reading. I say that
because I did not set out to be a writer early in life. I wanted to be first a
pilot and then an architect at different stages of my life. I also loved to
draw. But when I would read books, published books, I would often find myself
using a pencil to make corrections in what people have written. Afterwards, I
began attempting to write them the way I thought they should have been written
and then one thing led to another and so on and so forth.
What
do you hope to achieve with the ‘End the Story’ competition?
We have a lot of
fantastic writers in Nigeria as you already know. I always say I’m your
favourite writer’s favourite writer (laughs) and that’s by faith, okay, because
that’s what I want to become. But then, some people who have read my work have
said, Oh, ‘Seun you write so well and all the other washings they give you on
twitter. But truth be told, there are several other aspiring writers that are
exceptionally brilliant. How do I know this? I have quite a number of protégés
already on and off twitter, even though I still consider myself an aspiring
writer. I have never met many of them before. I would read some of their works
and go, Wow! So I have always known I had to be able to find a way to engage
writers and get people to tell their beautiful stories. Sometimes people just
need some form of platform, and those platforms are not enough. You dear
(Payme) for instance, I got to know about you after my friend (Omojuwa) did
Superbloggers. So we need these platforms. With End the Story, we hope to find
three exceptional writers that I can help in my own little way to improve on
their art and get better at what they do.
