Born in Ilase-Ijesa,
Osun State, Nigeria, Molara Wood has lived what she describes as "a fairly nomadic life", encompassing two decades in
Britain, where she had initially gone to study ("Three or four years max, was the plan. But life happens. You don't see the years rolling into each other, then you wake up one day, and you've been in
England for 20 years"). In a 2015 interview with Oyebade Dosunmu for
Aké Review, Wood elaborated: "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 transmute, 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 served as a window into the world of Nigerian immigrants, revealing the realities of their experiences." In 2008, Wood won the inaugural
John La Rose Memorial Short Story Competition. Since returning to Nigeria, she has been Arts and Culture Editor of
Next newspaper (which ceased publication in 2011), and currently writes an Arts column for
The Guardian in
Lagos, where she is now based. During her time at
Next, she was the editor for
Teju Cole´s
Letters to a young Writer series. She is also a blogger.
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 cycle 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." She is on the Advisory Board of the
Aké Arts and Book Festival and has been a participant in many literary events, including the Lagos Book & Art Festival. In 2022, she was appointed a writer-in-residence by the
Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD), based in
Accra, Ghana. ==Bibliography==